And here’s the empirical evidence. The charts linked below show the level of media activity in the English speaking media world wide. The activity includes: news articles, news stories, blog posts, tweets and YouTube Videos.

Interest in the CAGW has halved in the first 8 months of 2013, and is down 90% since the 2009 peak.

The AGU Position Statement, AGU Supports Free and Open Communication of Scientific Findings, expresses a commitment to communicate results “without sensationalizing or politicizing the associated impacts“; and

– Claims regarding “impacts harmful to society” such as projected increases in “extremes”, “threats to public health, water availability, agricultural productivity,… and coastal infrastructure”, acceleration of “biodiversity loss”, “surprise outcomes”, and “even more dramatic changes than anticipated” which appear sensational and

– Policy recommendations, such as “substantial emissions cuts,” which have significant political consequences; and

Whereas,

The conflict between the above position statements violate the AGU’s core principle of integrity; and

Whereas,

The AGU can most effectively fulfill its duty to disseminate scientific knowledge relevant public policy while preserving its commitment to “freedom of responsible scientific expression” and its core value of diversity of scientific ideas by remaining neutral as a society while publishing statements formulated and endorsed by groups of scientists who support them and encouraging publication of dissenting views:

“Yes, the unemployment rate fell a notch to 7.3 percent, from 7.4 percent in July. Yes, the nation added 169,000 jobs, broadly consistent with the pattern of recent months.

But in almost all the particulars, you can find signs that this job market is weaker than it appeared just a few months ago, and maybe getting worse. The drop in the unemployment rate was caused by 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force. The number of people actually reporting having a job actually fell by 115,000 in the survey on which the unemployment rate is based.

And while the overall August jobs number was okay, the Labor Department revised down its estimates of June and July job creation by a combined 74,000 positions. In other words, through the summer, hiring has been quite a bit shakier than it had appeared.”
…
“Want another sign? The proportion of the U.S. population that had a job in August was 58.6 percent. Six months earlier, the number was a whopping — wait for it — 58.6 percent. The year is nearly three-quarters over, and the economy isn’t growing fast enough to put a higher proportion of its citizens back to work.”

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the August unemployment rate was 7.3 percent, down a tick from 7.4 percent in July. The worrisome part is why the rate fell. The size of the workforce declined by about 300,000 and the participation rate fell to 63.2 percent from 63.4 percent—the lowest since August 1978. The participation rate is the number of people either working or actively searching for work as a share of the working-age population. It rose steadily over the years as more women entered the workforce before falling sharply in the 2007-09 recession, and it hasn’t recovered since.”

‘Although the shale resource estimates presented in this report will likely change over time as additional information becomes available, it is evident that shale resources that were until recently not included in technically recoverable resources constitute a substantial share of overall global technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources. The shale oil resources assessed in this report, combined with EIA’s prior estimate of U.S. tight oil resources that are predominantly in shales, add approximately 11 percent to the 3,012 billion barrels of proved and unproved technically recoverable nonshale oil resources identified in recent assessments. The shale gas resources assessed in this report, combined with EIA’s prior estimate of U.S. shale gas resources, add approximately 47 percent to the 15,583 trillion cubic feet of proved and unproven nonshale technically recoverable natural gas resources. Globally, 32 percent of the total estimated natural gas resources are in shale formations, while 10 percent of estimated oil resources are in shale or tight formations.’ http://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/worldshalegas/

This is a relatively new report that I have linked to a couple of times – in response to webby’s dire but misguided prognostications. These figures – which have significant exclusions and so are very conservative – tell that oil and gas supplies are not at imminent risk of depletion. Resources are in fact multiples of total use to date.

All wells are not the same, WHT. Plus, you haven’t the faintest clue what technology is around the corner. I don’t remember your prediction of shale oil getting as big as it has. But you do have a really nice rear-view mirror.

You are the oil professional, jim2. Your types love to “hide the decline” don’t you? Ouch!

“Plus, you haven’t the faintest clue what technology is around the corner. I don’t remember your prediction of shale oil getting as big as it has. But you do have a really nice rear-view mirror.”

It will be a pimple on the approximately 2.3 trillion barrels of crude oil of the world’s URR estimate,

Playing the technology card is a canard, and it means that you have lost the argument. Analysis is often about evaluating the current technologies, and is used to make the decision for moving to other technologies. You lost, jim2, face up to the facts.

Everyone wants to know what Henry Hub benchmark gas price is required for an unconventional well to recoup costs and turn profitable. The less than satisfying but most accurate answer is “it depends.”
“Some wells are profitable at $2.65 per thousand cubic feet, others need $8.10 … the median is $4.85,” Medlock said.
The presence of natural gas liquids—which fetch higher prices than dry natural gas—is one major factor, but infrastructure access, lease costs, local fiscal conditions and other variables contribute to well economics.
Similarly, well-specific estimated ultimate recovery (EUR) can vary substantially within a play, said Medlock.
In statistical terms, “the central tendency of distribution matters,” he said. Operators have portfolios of wells and the average production cost gives you a marginal cost.
Medlock also cleared the air with regard to the interplay between rig count and production volumes. Many analysts and industry observers pay close attention to natural gas or oil rig count data, which tells you how many rigs are operating at a given time.
“Rig count and production is highly non-linear,” said Medlock, who explained that companies lay down their least productive rigs when commodity prices dip. By leaving the most productive rigs running, overall production volumes will not correlate directly to changes in rig count.
One also cannot directly translate shale gas development costs in U.S. plays to other prospective areas around the world. For example, a 10,500 vertical foot well with a 4,000 foot lateral in the Haynesville Shale costs about $8 million, Medlock said, but the same well in Poland would cost $14 million to $16 million.

WHT – I would think that someone with your apparently high level of intelligence would be able to perceive and learn a lesson from the Hockey Team. It is credible to admit your uncertainties. To never admit for uncertainty is incredible.

Also, you don’t seem to have a point. We all know that fossil fuel is a finite resource. So, what exactly is your goal, given that we all know what you seem to be trying to prove?

jim2
I admit uncertainties because I am dealing with a STOCHASTIC model. You do realize that stochastic means probabilities which indicates uncertainty? I place a maximum entropy dispersion in the diffusional flow rate model.

As another example, about 30% of the Bakken wells won’t make a profit based on a spread of flow rates.

Rune Likvern from Norway has done an independent analysis and finds the same average flow rate after 12 months as I have, about 88,000 barrels. See the black line above and the post below.http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10102

“Also, you don’t seem to have a point. We all know that fossil fuel is a finite resource. So, what exactly is your goal, given that we all know what you seem to be trying to prove?”

“Yes the head of the second-biggest fossil-fuel funder of anti-science disinformation — whose goal is to kill the public’s trust in scientists and the scientific method — is worried that young people don’t want to study science or pursue science as a career.”

Where or when has an oil company ever educated the public about the truth?

@WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | September 7, 2013 at 8:49 am |
“Any problem can be solved by hypothetically suggesting solutions that do not yet exist.”

I hold out the same hope that technology will advance for alternative energy just as I do hold out hope that oilfield tech will continue to advance. I have been an electronics tech, chemist, and programmer. I do believe in technology and have made small contributions along the way. At any rate, first and foremost I am an energy consumer. I am not beholden to oil companies in any way, shape, or form. I want cheap energy. For me; nuclear (thorium as well as uranium), natural gas, coal, petroleum, Joule Unlimited gasoline, hydro, and other things we haven’t even thought of yet are good sources of energy. Wind and solar are still expensive, but if some of those are competitive; I’m OK with them as long as I don’t have a windmill within a mile of my house.

9. 50,000 future wells
The industry has already drilled about 5,000 wells in the Bakken, which means that the play might only be 10% developed. This has oil-field services companies like Heckmann (NYSE: NES ) envisioning a real long-term opportunity in the play. The company, which is an environmental solutions provider focusing on the water used in fracking, has a very large Bakken operation. While some will point to falling rig counts, the industry has become much more efficient in getting its well costs down, meaning its drilling more wells with fewer rigs. That could yield even more profitable wells in the future as long as oil prices stay elevated.

10. 7.4 billion barrels of oil
Five years ago the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the Bakken might contain 3 billion-4.3 billion barrels of oil. Now, with the development of the Three Forks formation, it’s nearly doubled the estimated amount of oil that could be pulled out of the region. Some in the industry, including Continental Resources, think that the estimates are still way too low, as the company believes those formations could hold 24 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

Foolish bottom line
The numbers don’t lie: The Bakken is a phenomenal oil play that should produce for many years to come. As it does, those companies operating in the region will enjoy their share of profits.

3. 45 years
A typical Bakken well will continue to produce oil for the next 45 years. Over those years the well will likely switch hands as the steep initial decline rates could force producers to sell wells to an MLP such as LINN Energy (NASDAQ: LINE ) . In 2011, the company acquired Concho Resources assets in the Bakken, which included non-operated oil wells and an interest in 400 potential future drilling locations. LINN, which typically acquires mature assets, is positioning itself to consolidate Bakken wells once producers, such as its partners in these wells, are ready to cash out.

You seem to sputter and resort to random quote-mining when confronted with science.

And I am sure that an institute honoring the Bush administrations main lawyer and oil lobbyist Baker is completely free of political angling. Amy Jaffe is one of the main document writers for that administration’s rationale for going to war in Iraq.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4354269.stm

“New plans, obtained from the State Department by Newsnight and Harper’s Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favoured by the US oil industry. It was completed in January 2004 under the guidance of Amy Jaffe of the James Baker Institute in Texas. “

Oil reserves have increased by 30% in the last decade, gas reserves by 50%. Yet the webster concentrates on the least least important new source of fossil fuels being tight oil. The reserves are large enough that shortages are not happening any time soon.

The link I provided discussed the status of world oil reserves. Moving past the fundamentally incorrect notion of peak oil to recognise that energy is endlessly fungible. If one source becomes expensive we naturally and quickly move to another source. The authors in fact argue that this has already happened – in that technological innovation spurred by high prices has opened up other resources.

Webster waffles on about diffusion and stochastic models. In principle it assumes a prior distribution – and then is meant to incorporate a Beyesian posterior. Webster has no use for real data in a posterior distribution – so the results can only be defined as fantasy. I am not wasting any more of my time on it. His Bakken wells are moreover such a small part of the picture that it is trivial nonsense to quibble about production rates there.

There are 90 years supply of oil at current reserves – which will increase – at current consumption. Liquid fuel sourced from gas is increasing in volume. Coal to liquids is viable at current oil prices. Fossil fuel resources are not the problem.

“Webster waffles on about diffusion and stochastic models. In principle it assumes a prior distribution – and then is meant to incorporate a Beyesian posterior. “

That is completely wrong. This is physical uncertainty we are talking about, which is governed by statistical mechanics and equations of continuity, not some phrases that you looked up to make yourself appear knowledgeable,

The Bakken is a big deal here, because each country has its own resources.

“Yes his agenda is obviously political, and seems to require that fossil has peaked. “

Hey buddy, how can it be political when I put together a semantic web server devoted to environmental models called http://ContextEarth.com ? Is it true that coming up with spectral models of terrain surfaces is a political act?

I apply mathematics and physics to environmental problems, and use you guys as test driving dummies because this site is called Climate Etc.

The fact that many of you go into wingnut territory is not my problem.

“an individual average Bakken well has a cumulative that is less than 300,000 barrels and that they reach half their cumulative production in just 3 years”

Oil is a $110, so the well will deliver $33 million worth of oil.

“a 10,500 vertical foot well with a 4,000 foot lateral in the Haynesville Shale costs about $8 million”

Now call me Dr. Suspicious, but isn’t $33 million more that $8 million? Additionally, don’t we find that when a group of people decided to do something, time after time, that they get better at it and do the same job for less and less cost?

Now you say a well give half its output in three years. So an investment of $8 million doubles in three years; refresh my memory, how much return would you get in T-bills over three years?

“For $90/barrel oil, the breakeven flow is 60,000 barrels after one year”

I have lived in two US States, Michigan and Texas. In both states I see nodding donkeys in fields extracting a few hundred barrels of oil a week.
Obviously none of these stupid people realize that they cannot make money extracting such small amounts, even though they have nice houses and trucks; damned fools arn’t they.

Doc,
Those are called “stripper wells” and they are remnants of conventional crude oil reservoirs; these feed off of what was originally a much larger reservoir volume, typically in the millions of barrels.

On the other hand, individual Bakken wells do not have a large reservoir to draw from and get abandoned and “shut in” much quicker than a conventional stripper.

On the Bakken, there have been 9300 wells in production at one time (counted as of last year) but only 5700 of these are considered still active. That’s not so good considering that most of them have popped up only in the last several years.

First of all, the Chief Waterboy raised my name out of the blue, in a thread that I had yet to remark in.

Second, The Chef Waterboy supposedly has knowledge in flow though porous matter, considering he calls himself a hydrologist. That’s the science I am referring to.

Third, jim2 is apparently a petrochemical engineer of some sort, who comments here as an apologist for the fossil fuel industry.

Fourth, having some knowledge about the limits of oil reserves in shale deposits has significance in projecting future CO2 emissions.

Fifth, the difficulty in extraction and the cost of hydrofracturing for oil is not well known, and that is what effects the pocketbook of consumers, and what leads to economic transformations. The hype surrounding shale in the Bakken region and elsewhere in regards to its oil potential is shown by Chief’s out-of-the-blue cheerleading.

Using his knowledge of hydrology, the Chief should be able to keep up with a straightforward model of diffusional flow in a shale well. Same goes for jim2. The final point I made is that these wells are not exactly gushers. The USA used about 20 million barrels of oil a day, as of a few years ago, which is equivalent to extracting completely about 20 million/0.25 million = 80 Bakken-style wells per day. That means nearly 30,000 of these are required per year, if we ever wanted to supply all of our liquid fuel needs from Bakken wells. It is entirely possible that 30,000 is the upper limit of the number of wells we can drill in the Bakken before diminishing returns on the reserve has completely set in.

“Third, jim2 is apparently a petrochemical engineer of some sort, who comments here as an apologist for the fossil fuel industry.”

WHT – I can’t blame you for not remembering this, so I will repeat it. I spent several years as an oilfield chemist. That was many years ago. I moved from chemistry to programming – which has proved to be a good decision. I don’t have anything but good memories of the oilfield. Loved it. But I am no longer associated with it in any way – other than the fact that I am an energy consumer. I want cheap energy. That includes gasoline, which is why I am a big fan of Joule Unlimited.

Also, I want the government to butt out of the energy business completely. The price of oil and the desire of smart people to better themselves will take care of the rest.

I know I must induce loads of cognitive dissonance in your neural net, but try your best to be objective anyway.

“Also, I want the government to butt out of the energy business completely. “

Globally, you have a fat chance of this ever happening.

Energy is a critical military resource in many ways: availability, machines for creating, transporting, controlling, and that use it, and so on. National governments have an obligation to protect their citizens victims, and a Darwinian necessity to protect their national territories, economies, and other resources (including populations). Letting an international “free” market control the development and allocation of energy-related resources isn’t really consistent with either agenda.

One cannot help but notice that the, 1970-2012, CRUSST’s show that he Northern SST is rising one and a half times faster than the Southern SST. I find it unlikely that his is heat transference from land.

There is no question that spatio-temporal oscillations exist that change the amplitude of warming in geographically varying ways, but these will get filtered out over the long term. That is what the above graph is showing.

FOMBSConclusion Young climate-scientists in particular appreciate that “the best available science” tells just one story: the Earth is warming.

Even though there isn’t any serious evidence to support this. Not to worry, as government employees they are just saying what they are paid to say, which is : whatever is good for government. That’s what the best available government climate science is there for.

I doubt there is any valid dispute that more fuels are burnt in the N hemisphere than the southern. So you would expect the northern hemisphere to be hotter Also the southern is mostly water which is a huge resevior of past heat, but it is slow to pick up the new heat from the north

But you have to read between the lines. In a nutshell, the NH and SH tropical ocean area is about the same and both provide energy poleward. The SH has less land mass and better mixing while the NH has much more land mass which increases as a percentage of total NH area moving north. Land/ocean area in the latitude range from 45N to 60N is ~1.3 on average so there is an average 30% amplification, with a higher probability of precipitation falling on land allowing transfer of ocean energy to land mass.

The Atlantic has tighter flow choke and collects most of the land runoff so it maintains a higher average SST near the mid and upper latitudes, making CET a fair proxy for “global” temperature which is dominated by NH ocean and land fluctuations.

You are not helping me here. CO2 is well mixed and should deliver the same amount of photon recycling in both hemispheres. The sea surface temperature rises of the two hemispheres have high correlation, but a difference in a factor of 1.5.
Why? Without handwaving.

The HadSST plots from Web above indicate a strong cooling in the NH SST in the 60’s followed by a catching up. I believe this is the global dimming phenomenon that was confined to the NH, and manifested especially over the W Atlantic downstream of the growing eastern US sulphate emissions at that time. The east US cooled significantly in the same period along with its offshore Atlantic area.

I tend to agree with Spencer and Braswell. “The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

A good question is what makes Kevin Trenberth believe it is more likely that the ‘missing heat’ went mysteriously into the deep ocean instead of obviously back out to space. The answer to that good question is not obvious, but I’ve a good guess.
==============

To understand heat “going into the oceans” versus going up into space one must first look at the thermodynamics of the full system and get your terms correct and general flow correct. First, the net flow of energy is from ocean to atmosphere, so talk about heat going into the ocean from the atmosphere is simply wrong. What we can see over various time frames is the net energy flux from ocean to atmosphere being greater or lesser, but it is always positive. Various mechanisms such as downwelling combined with wind may pump heat to deeper parts of the ocean, but the vast majority of this heat came not from the atmosphere, but the Sun, in the form of SW radiation. Ultimately, outer space is the final destination for LW radiation, ultimately going out to join the other waste heat of the universe, increasing the entropy, and leading to the eventual heat death of this particular universe.

Watched the launch of the NASA LADEE moon orbiter (unmanned) tonight from my front porch in Maryland. It was launched aboard a 5 stage Minotaur V rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island facility on the Virginia coast–maybe about 130-150 miles away. It was easy to see, including the exhaust trail even for my old eyes. Nice. Now I have seen a launch :o)

The Minotaur V is a recycled Peacekeeper ICBM. It is solid fueled and uses perchlorate as the oxidizer, so dumps huge amounts of ozone eating halides in the upper atmosphere.
Wait for the EPA to do an intervention.

All I wish for today is a landslide victory for the conservatives in today’s Australian election and that Labor and Greens lose their majority in the Senate so they cannot block legislation in the Senate.

One of the Conservative’s key policies that has gained massive support is repeals of the carbon pricing legislation. They will also close down much of the climate change bureaucracy that has been set up to support, administer and advocate the climate change policies of the outgoing Labor-Green government.

Bonne chance, mon ami!
I know it’s bad form ter be a gloater voter
but serfs don’t known no better. I have put
a year’s savings from hoein’ and plantin’ inter
purchasin’ a bottle of French champagne,
hopefully and appreciatively ter celebrate
a change of pollcies from tax ‘n control ter
embracin’ open society possibilities in the
our great land
down
under.

A new beginning,15+ seat win, a new guvuhmint! Hopefully
the oppotrunuty fer people ter be freer and more productive
w/out punitive carbon taxes. Toasted the fucher and raised
a glass ter me friends here at CE, Judith’s microcosm of the
open society.
Cheers.,
Beth the serf
Ps A new edishun of Serf Under_ground comin’ ter an
undisclosed outlet in yore locality soon.

Heard him on the radio. Almost as annoying a voice as Julia. Lets hope his policies will make economic sense-a carbon tax on the citizens of a country whose main export is coal has always seemed strange.

This is how I see it. Most anthro. heating is in
the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere
temperature is mostly influenced by the surface
tenperature of the oceans. One of the unknown
unknowns is the delay of the S hemisphere catching
up with the N hrmisphere’s rising temperature. The
1910 – 1940 temperature rise seemed to disappear
sharply after 1940, but it did not. It produced the
first ‘pause’ in history starting in 1948 and
extending to 1970. Now the S hemisphere resists
temperature change for two reasons: First, because
water is a poor conductor of heat, so heat
transport depends on Coriolis at depth and wind and
haline density induced slow currants. This is not
an inertial delay but a true transport delay. This
difference is vital in climate models, but is
largely unknown as a parameter But the southern
oceans’ huge heat storage means it will be slow to
change – say at a guess about 30 years. My thesis
is that the global temperature rise between 1970
and 1998 was just the second installment of the
0.5C atmospheric rise between 1910 and 1940. See my
website underlined above.Of coarse the IPCC missed
all this because it mostly confined its
investigatiohs to post-1961

How long can the pause last? Can it last for ever?
CO2′s voracious appetite for energy can omly be
satisfied in two ways: kinetic and vibrational
energy. We can forget kinetic, because it is no
worse than O2 or N2 and it is less than 1% of the
atmosphere. The answer has to be in the vibrational
modes, of which there are many. When CO2 leaves the
cylinders of your car or the furnace of the power
station it is over 1,000C – very hot and most of,
if not all. of its vibrational modes will be
excited. When it exits the tail pipe or chimney it
is still very hot and we would expect it to rise in
the troposphere as a plume of hot gas passing its
heat to the N2 and O2 as it rises. As it rises in
the troposphere (like a hot air balloon) it can
more readily radiate its heat into space, because
the atmosphere above is thinning. So what
propottion of heat is radiated into space, instead
of heating our planet?. As the CO2 cools, density
increases, it will fall again, maybe having used up
all its excitation modes, it can no longer heat the
planet. So this simple but apparently little
understood chain of events may not be such a
threat?

So this explanation of CO2′s behavior in the
troposphere can explain the pause. So long as the
hot, new proportion of CO2 from exhaust or
chimneyremains below the presert level the pause
will continue. Note that this new metric of CO2, if
accepted, focuses not on total CO2, but on the
proportion of new,hot CO2..If you can spare the time to read this blog please let me know if the science is not valid.

Alexander Biggs,
Jest read yr ‘alternative theory of climate change.
As an escapee from the Hu-mann-itees and a serf ter boot,
I do me best ter follow the debate. Yr spectral information
and post 1940 pause in warming, ocean lag and cloud
narrative, fitting the data as provided by the BOM, seems
like a good fit to the mysterious rising of temps followed by
pauses. Thx.
bts

Bob: thamks for your reply. Yes, I,m aware that a hot chimney represents inefficiency. What we don’t know is which vibrational modes are sustained at 300C. But we do know that Henry Ford produced 15 million model T’s between 1908 and 1927. Henry could not improve the efficiency of his engines much because of the low octane rating of the fuels available.

‘Courage’ would seem to be the whole problem with professional climatolgy and its 97% ‘consensus’. (Well, the proximate cause – the underlying one driving it, being the huge vested interest of the near-monopoly funder).

I would like to know how much CO2 it takes to warm up the earth? Something like (X)ppm warms 1 degree C. I know there are too many variables to give an exact but if that is what is postulated it must have some kind of a parameter number?
I was recently looking up the atmosphere of Venus and noticed a footnote on the wiki page of the atmosphere of Venus: “A runaway greenhouse effect may have been caused by the evaporation of the surface water and subsequent rise of the levels of other greenhouse gases.[7][8]” The footnote led to this paper: Kasting, J.F. (1988). “Runaway and moist greenhouse atmospheres and the evolution of Earth and Venus”. Icarus 74 (3): 472–494. I managed to find a pdf of this paper. Here is the abstract:
A one dimensional climate model is used to study the response of an Earth-like atmosphere to large increases in solar flux.For fully saturated, cloud free conditions, the critical solar flux at which a runaway greenhouse occurs, that is the oceans evaporate entirely, is found to be 1.4 times the present flux at Earth’s orbit (So). This value is close to the flux expected at Venus’ orbit early in solar system history. It is nearly independent of the amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere, but it is sensitive to the H2O absorption coefficient in the 8 to 12-pm window region. Clouds should tend to depress the surface temperature on a warm, moist planet; thus, Venus may have originally have had oceans if its initial water endowment was close to that of Earth. It lost them early in it’s history, however, because of rapid photodissociation of water vapor followed by escape of hydrogen to space. The critical solar flux above which water is lost could be as low as 1.1So. The surface temperature of a runaway greenhouse atmosphere containing a full ocean’s worth of water would have been in excess of 1500*K — above the solidus for silica rocks. The presence of such a steam atmosphere during accretion may have significantly influenced the early thermal evolution of both Earth and Venus.
There is also this abstract from a previous paper:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11539665
“Abstract
The possible consequences of very high carbon dioxide concentrations in the earth’s early atmosphere have been investigated with a radiative-convective climate model. The early atmosphere would apparently have been stable against the onset of a runaway greenhouse (that is, the complete evaporation of the oceans) for carbon dioxide pressures up to at least 100 bars. A 10- to 20-bar carbon dioxide atmosphere, such as may have existed during the first several hundred million years of the earth’s history, would have had a surface temperature of approximately 85 degrees to 110 degrees C. The early stratosphere should have been dry, thereby precluding the possibility of an oxygenic prebiotic atmosphere caused by photodissociation of water vapor followed by escape of hydrogen to space. Earth’s present atmosphere also appears to be stable against a carbon dioxide-induced runaway greenhouse.
I realize it’s an old paper and I have no idea what he thinks of global warming at the levels being talked about today and whether or not it will melt all the ice but he seems to have quite a pedigree:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kasting.

Evidently he thinks that an organization (in this case government) working to further its own interests (jn this case by manufacturing climate alarm), necessitates a “conspiracy”. And hence that anyone not willing to ignore this self-interest elephant in the room, is a “conspiracy theorist”.

Projection on your part. Little Miss Sunshine is the one that was suggesting that there was something nefarious surrounding the fact that the ice monitoring team changed their algorithm for estimating ice surface area.

I may be asking the right question of the wrong person. However, it seems a question worth asking. The political downside – noted by Tsonis and colleagues below – of decadal cooling seems both obvious and significant.

‘Dear Professor Alley,

I have followed your work on abrupt climate change for some time. Climate shifts are evident on many scales in the Earth system. What seems especially intriguing and relevant is the potential for decadal shifts. For instance Mojib Latif discusses a new paper in sciencedaily

“The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.”http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm

The climate shifts occurred in 1977/1977 – the Great Pacific Climate Shift – and in 1998/2001. The latter is something I am somewhat ironically calling the Momentous Pacific Climate Shift. Together they signal the need – I feel – for a momentous change in thinking about climate. There are obvious implications of such frequent climate shifts – it raises the ire of Broeckers angry beast. On the other hand it raises the possibility of no warming – or even cooling – decades into the future. In the words of Anastasios Tsonis and colleagues.

‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’ Swanson, K. L., and A. A. Tsonis (2009), Has the climate recently shifted?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L06711, doi:10.1029/2008GL037022.

And again.

‘Finally, the presence of vigorous climate variability presents significant challenges to near-term climate prediction (25, 26), leaving open the possibility of steady or even declining global mean surface temperatures over the next several decades that could present a significant empirical obstacle to the implementation of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (27). However, global warming could likewise suddenly and without any ostensive cause accelerate due to internal variability. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis – the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.’ Kyle L. Swanson, George Sugihara, Anastasios A. Tsonis (2009), Long-term natural variability and 20th century climate change, 16120–16130 _ PNAS _ September 22, 2009 _ vol. 106 _ no. 38

The political implications of decades more of no warming seem obvious. I was surprised therefore at your recent AGU presentation that seems to neglect this potential. It seems an all in strategy more likely to fail than otherwise if temperatures fail to rise for decades – as they may well do in the current cool decadal mode. The risk of calling people climate zombies for saying that global temperature stalled post the 1998/2001 climate shift appear therefore to be all on the downside. It leads to the most relevant question – is warming over the next few decades not a certainty that may well come unstuck?

I find a huge number of shows unwatchable. I get my exercise by constantly getting up and leaving the room every time one more moronic show comes on. I wonder how Newton Minnow would have described the state of today’s TV. A vast wasteland doesnt do it justice.

Webby, you say, “Do you deny pensioners on a fixed income the cheap energy that they will need so they will not freeze to death? ”
You seem a bit incoherent today. What does cheap energy, in relation to the topic of slaughtering eagles with windmills, have to do denying pensioners on fixed income with said energy. Drop the windmills Webby and get behind fracking full throatily.

That’s an excellent point, MAx. Assuming it’s true for a wild and painful half a second….that AGW can worsen/strengthen storms… how many storms were lessened, or more likely did not occur at all, under this different atmospheric regime?

NOAA says “The report shows that the effects of natural weather and climate fluctuations played a key role in the intensity and evolution of the 2012 extreme events. However, in some events, the analyses revealed compelling evidence that human-caused climate change, through the emission of heat-trapping gases, also contributed to the extreme event.”

One wonders what this compelling evidence might be? Perhaps they are too easily compelled, or compelled by what?

John Kehr’s book ‘The inconvenient skeptic’. I recently read this book, which I enjoyed. It gives a good overview of how the Earth’s climate changes long term, and tries to put the current CC into perspective.
Googling provides very little comment on it, whether pro or critical.
Any thought from anyone – or links to some good reviews?http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/the-book/
Mostly positive comments on Amazon.

I have read the book. I would say it is very good, but not an easy or accessible read, in other words you would need to be fairly science minded or knowledgeable about climate science to benefit.

We must be realistic that us denizens at CE are the equivalent of camera toting train enthusiasts who hang over the bridges of railways running a steam train Sunday .

Al gore had the right idea in trying to popularise the subject with his sci-fi film and I am not sure anyone on the sceptical side has managed anything equivalent that would appeal to a wide -non train spotting-audience.

I am sure that scientific academia would have ignored the book. BTW another worthy but heavy book setting out the science is ‘Chill’ by Peter Taylor.
tonyb

Tony, in passing, when aged about ten I was on the platform at Newcastle when the famous Flying Scotsman came in. The crew let me into the cabin. My main memory is of the intense heat when the fire-box door was opened for more fuel to be thrown in (shovel-fed by the driver’s assistant). Local warming at its best.

Thanks for the link. I have a lot of reading to do and not enough time (being a small business owner) I was particularly struck by this:
“That was a truly profound decision, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Getting the facts about the science of global warming is comparable to untying the Gordian Knot. Each side of the debate is very well entrenched and they don’t even discuss science anymore. It has devolved into a series of talking points that each side memorizes for every possible comment that could be made. There is no real thought process behind most discussion anymore, just mindless regurgitation.

Somewhere in the mix of it all there is good information, but it has become buried deep inside misinformation and is scattered about and disorganized. There is simply no place where someone can go to get a good scientific overview of the Earth’s climate. That is all I wanted to find, but everything that was available was just arranged as talking points designed to highlight the flaws in the other side’s arguments. That is not science, that is political debate.”
– See more at: http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/the-book/#sthash.ybSV64bo.dpuf
I am there right now except without as much background to decipher it as far as looking at data. I was hoping to have some enlightenment here at CE but it seems pretty much like the description this guy made about talking points. I wish there was somewhere us ignorant peasants could find reliable factual information.

A paper published today in Theoretical and Applied Climatology appears to corroborate Spencer & Braswell’s 2011 paper concluding that “atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations.”

The new paper also finds a problem of misdiagnosis of climate feedbacks due to “noise” from natural variation, stating, “we see that the [natural] non-feedback variation plays the most significant role in distorting the curve in the lagged correlation graph, thus obscuring the exact value of climate feedback”

Climate science is the search for money, fame, power, and tenure. But it’s always been thus… in all sciences. ‘Tis the human condition. I’d say the difference here is that in order to get the above mentioned goodies, you have to be on the right side, the “approved” side…which obviously is profoundly corrupting

JAXA altered DMI 30% altered all within weeks of each other and a looming IPCC report.
What’s the bet it mentions lower arctic sea ice levels as it’s main proof of global warming. Even though the arctic has had it’s coldest winter.
As for the warmest arctic summer , the ice extent is at record high levels.

On a different note how can CO2 be an external forcing when it does not of itself produce any heat and the total amount of heat in the system not just in the atmosphere does not change.
Sun heat in volcanoes heat in, heck asteroids heat in if they hit. Clouds water CO2 land where’s the new energy production for an external forcing?

The properties of the radiative spectrum — how different wavelengths contribute to radiative energy — holds the key to how the temperature changes. Blocking certain wavelengths forces the temperature of the radiating gray body upward to compensate for the missing radiative windows.

That is why you so often see civil engineers, mechanical engineers, etc that are the most ardent deniers of GHG theory. They apply the usually reliable energy conservation principles to the problem, see something that doesn’t make sense, and then jump to bad conclusions.

On the other hand, physicists, electrical engineers, etc rarely have problems with the CO2 as an external forcing because they were taught electro-magnetic field theory, photonics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics when they were in school.

As usual you miss the point. CO2 both responds to “true”, solar, mechanical, geothermal energy actually applied to the system and produces an additional insulating factor by blocking selected wavelengths. CO2 impact is dependent on the energy available in the system, a response plus it has a insulation impact which increases with more CO2 being added. Calling CO2 just a forcing when it has a duel role is misleading and incorrect.

Webby, you can count the number of “most ardent deniers of GHG theory” on one hand. CO2 is in fact a GHG, just a minor one and definitely not a significant control knob gas.
”

It is a significant control knob, because one can apply basic physics and show that the earth would sit closer to 255K than the 288K it sits at right now if CO2 was completely removed from the atmosphere.

The majority of the water vapor would condense out and there would be little left of GHGs to raise the temperature above 255K.

For mechanical and civil engineers, I would use the concept of insulation, which is the external heat loss flux for a given external to internal temperature difference (or R-value). The atmosphere has an external flux of 240 W/m2 for a temperature difference between surface and outgoing effective temperatures of 33 C. Adding CO2 increases the R value without affecting surface heating. The outgoing flux is constrained by the energy balance, so the internal (surface) temperature has to increase.

I was a Test and Balance Engineer. I was the prick that tested, adjusted and balanced HVAC related systems and equipment designed by M.E.s I was hired before completing my EE and had to challenge a national test to be certified as a TBE. I opted not to challenge for my P.E. certificate, without degree, because I had no problem hiring mechanical P.E.s. fro the rare occasions my reports needed review.

A TBE is like a jack of all construction engineering, so instead of designing a few hundred systems I tested 1000s, designed a few “modifications”, consulted on designs and retrofits, only published one article, made money and drank beer.

Webby is an utter maniac. It is the sort of interweb madness you see quite commonly – bizarre rationalisations commencing from insane assumptions.

The peak of the Planck distribution shifts with temperature – it is called Wein’s Displacement Law. Work out for yourself what this means at Earth temperatures. Plug in Earth’s average temperature and the change last century.

The potential energy of molecules in part includes electron orbits that are above the ground state. Orbits shift in discrete jumps – quantum jumps – dependent on the energy of absorbed photons. The energy is proportional to the frequency – the quantum idea. This is the important aspect of IR absorption. When the orbits shift to a lower state of excitation – a photon is emitted at the same frequency. Total emission increase with temperature to the fourth power – but frequency shifts are utterly irrelevant nonsense invented by the webster to maintain the nonsense physics of a radiant imbalance at specific frequencies at TOA.

‘The definition of RF from the TAR and earlier IPCC assessment reports is retained. Ramaswamy et al. (2001) define it as ‘the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave; in W^m2) at the tropopause after allowing for stratospheric temperatures to readjust to radiative equilibrium, but with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values.’

This is obviously not real physics but simply a convenient metric – what changes is temperature.

The facts are apparent to all but purblind morons. You repeat this civil engineer cr@p endlessly – but I am a hydrologist and an environmental scientist. This not only gives me a much broader perspective than a twit like you – but we did study climate change. Which has given me a basis for understanding the thousands of papers I have read since.

You talk about the shift in peak with temperature – I provided the link – do the freakin’ math. You have a case that is just freakin’ interweb wack job insanity. Get a freakin’ clue why don’t you.
.

Do you agree that on a cold day, wearing a jacket keeps you warmer? Yet, there is no energy coming from that jacket. The jacket represents an external forcing, altering the normal rate of heat flow from your body to the colder air. It does this by altering the thermal gradient, slowing down the rate of heat flow. CO2 and other GH gases in the atmosphere alter the thermal gradient, reducing the rate of flow from the Earth’s primary “body” of heat, which is the ocean, to the cold of outer space.

Whatever varying thicknesses you want to employ to trap heat, the essential point is that they represent an external forcing to the body’s normal rate of heat loss. They provide no energy, yet externally force the body to stay warmer.

Human A (healthy) is standing in an ambient temperature equal to the “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature” of 15 degC, wearing a knee-length fur-lined parka and two thick woolen sweaters underneath

Human B (also healthy) is standing in the same ambient temperature wearing a light windbreaker and a light cashmere sweater underneath.

Question:

a) What is the body temperature of Human A?
b) What is the body temperature of Human B?
c) Is there a difference in body temperature between Human A and Human B?
d) Please elaborate

But the “natural factors”, which cause human A and Human B to have the same body temperature may be analogous to natural factors that cause surface air temperature not to vary directly with the “thickness of the CO2 blanket”.

The point is about the alteration of thermal gradients. The various forms of layering employed to alter that gradient is of course irrelevant to the central metaphor. The layers themselves provide no energy, yet act as external forcings to the system, just as the human carbon volcano is an external forcing to Earth’s climate system. We are adding a thicker and thicker jacket every hour of every day. What are the potential symptoms of heat stroke for a planet?

JimD, I like the insulation analogy. Say you have one redneck in a sleeping bag, the average temperature of the redneck’s butt is 90 degrees F. You put another redneck in the sleeping bag. Combined, the average redneck butt temperature increases to 91.5 degrees F. How many rednecks would be required to increase the average redneck butt temperature to 105 F degrees in a single sleeping bag?

Now you take the first redneck and double bag him. The butt temperature increases to 91.5 f degrees. How many bags are required to get the average butt temperature to 105 F degrees?

You bring in biology that provides a fix body temperature, I have to provide something that shows that things are different. Better analogies relate to insulated objects in cold surroundings that are provided with steady internal heat sources, and how the insulation affects the temperature. The body doesn’t have a steady internal heat source. It is a messy analogy to the earth where the sun provides a steady surface heat source.

JimD, “captd, geez, if that is your understanding of insulation, I hope you are not doing any mechanical or civil engineering for anyone these days.”

What can’t handle an abstract problem? Each layer of additional insulation is less effective as the previous layer if they have the same R-value. You approach a limit. If you add energy at a constant temperature to an insulated building, the interior temperature will approach the temperature of the contained bodies, er butts. There are limits to efficiency.

You seem to this a biological example is not applicable, water has a fixed temperatures of freezing and a fixed temperature of boiling provide pressure is constant. One is fixed, one varies with pressure. Is CO2 increasing surface pressure?

Gates. if we ignore the elliptical orbital induced changes and the variation in solar output over the solar cycle, then there is no change in the steady state rate at which the Earth is radiated by the sun and the rate that the Earth radiates into space. None. It is a steady state for God’s sake. The only loss to the system is the biotic storage of potential energy gradients in the form of atmospheric oxygen and the mineralization of carbon.

captd, you can see that if something is heated just by body heat it is limited to 37 C, but if it is heated by a heater at a constant setting, adding insulation just increases the interior temperature linearly in proportion to the insulation, which is why you can just add R-factors to see their total effect.

Except when the system is altered through an external forcing. Continually increasing GH gas concentrations allows the system to retain more energy. If you stop adding the gases, the system will eventually return to an equilibrium state, and the time to equilibrium depends on how much and how fast you added those gases. We know for example that it could take centuries for the great ice masses of Greenland and Antarctica to respond to a greater energy level of a system with more GH gases.

Energy in=Energy out AFTER GH gases stop increasing AND the system has had time to fully reach Earth System equilibrium.

JimD, “captd, you can see that if something is heated just by body heat it is limited to 37 C, but if it is heated by a heater at a constant setting, adding insulation just increases the interior temperature linearly in proportion to the insulation, which is why you can just add R-factors to see their total effect.”

If it is dry heat. That is the point with biological heat versus moist air. The majority of the surface being water limits the available temperature, not energy to the dry atmosphere. They is why I try to get people to think about the atmospheric boundary layer as a moist air envelop. CO2 has its greatest impact in lower humidity environments with enough energy to interact with CO2 and the energy transfer to that dry air is via latent cooling of the surface. Unless you increase the containment pressure of the atmospheric boundary layer you are not going to increase the steam temperature. You can expand the moist air envelop to include more of the surface, but there is only so much surface, so there is a limit.

captd, it is radiative heat, dry doesn’t come into it. The sun supplies dry heat, and the atmosphere allows it to get back out through radiation. Insulation impacts this flow. You can evaporate all the water you want in your warm house with a heater, it is the temperature differential that the insulation governs, so it will warm to a fixed temperature level regardless of any moisture you added. You can only delay it a little with evaporation.

Pekka, “The overall atmospheric pressure has very little influence on the moisture as long boiling point of water is not reached. The partial pressure of water is not affected by the pressure of N2 or O2.”

That is because the overall atmospheric pressure changes very little. If the atmospheric pressure were higher the partial pressure of water vapor would change. That is the point. Without adding pressure the effective boiling point, the Convective triggering potential, will not change. Maximum tropical SST is remarkably stable because of the convective triggering potential in case you had not noticed.

JimD, ” You can evaporate all the water you want in your warm house with a heater, it is the temperature differential that the insulation governs, so it will warm to a fixed temperature level regardless of any moisture you added. You can only delay it a little with evaporation.”

That is exactly the point attempted to be made. CO2 does not increase the solar energy so we are not increasing the energy used to boil the water, only reducing the heat loss. As you add more insulation, water can be boiled more efficiently increasing the rate of latent and convective surface cooling in the moist air region but not the temperature in the dry air region. How much impact the CO2 insulation has needs to be considered there. Just note the lack of warming in the tropics and the lack of a tropical troposphere warm spot.

Compare the latent heat loss 88Wm-2, convective 24Wm-2 and net radiant heat loss at the surface ~53 Wm-2. If you reduce the net radiant by 4Wm-2 to 49Wm-2, you will increase both latent and convective by some amount less than 4 Wm-2. Once you include atmospheric window from the true surface of approximately 20 Wm-2 you can have a radiant total from the true surface of 73Wm-2, if you add 4Wm-2 of insulation you are not going to block all of the radiant loss, so there will be increased cooling in latent, convective and some portion of the radiant spectrum. You will never get 100% efficiency out of the 4Wm-2 you add and each additional 4Wm-2 will be less efficient than the last.

Now if you increase solar, you increase the amount of water than can be boiled and the efficiency of the insulation by adding more energy to the atmospheric boundary layer which can react with the WMGHG in the dry atmosphere. That would also increase the amount of solar absorbed by the water vapor in the atmosphere reducing the solar absorbed at the surface as a ratio of total energy absorbed changed plus clouds would likely reflect more solar. As surface temperature increases, even the impact of solar decreases as it takes more energy per degree of surface temperature rise. The system tends to regulate itself or we would not be here discussing the subject.

Pekka, for better accuracy we always corrected for barometric pressure (Goff-Gratch). I imagine if CO2 was producing the impact expect, CC would be fine, but the lower sensitivity gets the more each little assumption will matter.

Where is the dependence on the actual overall pressure in the Goff-Gratch equation?

There are certainly some small changes related to the average molecular weight, perhaps also some other weak effects, but all these effects are really small.

Small corrections might matter if the evaporation would lead to a permanent energy removal from the surface. All that energy is, however, released in later condensation and the actual consequence is strengthening of the latent heat transfer. Changes in the latent heat transfer are, however, compensated by changes in convective heat transfer. A very small change in the average surface temperature is enough for producing that compensation. That applies, however, only to the average, not at every part of the surface separately.

captd, the point is that the insulation amount governs the temperature differential. It doesn’t matter what you do with the water, adding more insulation increases the temperature differential which ends up having to come into the surface temperature because that at space is fixed. The insulation analogy works well precisely because neither insulation nor radiation care about evaporative cooling. The balance is governed completely by temperature.

Pekka, “Where is the dependence on the actual overall pressure in the Goff-Gratch equation?”

It is a correction for altitude. Assuming a constant sea level pressure for the entire Earth is a reach. The Marine atmospheric boundary layer is roughly at 3000 meters and the land ABL varies from 100 to 3000 meters. The partial pressure that matters for a H2O radiant forcing would be above the ABL. So if you have a near constant temperature at 3000 meters thanks to water vapor and a near constant pressure you are not going to see a CC response to surface temperature. You need to correct for altitude.

JimD, “captd, the point is that the insulation amount governs the temperature differential. ”

You have different layers and types of insulation. Solar warms a section of the insulation changing the R-value of the latent/convective portion without having much impact on the radiant portion. Water condensation “fixes” a layer temperature at ~0C so you have a nifty multilayer problem. You cannot average over the whole layer when different internal layers are impacted by different factors. It is like dry or wet insulation, which would you rather have?

captd, if you think the earth can find a way to radiate more heat without its temperature increasing you need to state that, because that is what the radiative balance needs when you add CO2. Water vapor just ends up just getting in the way of this rebalancing by exacerbating the insulating effect requiring even warmer surface temperatures to achieve the balance.

The same values are regularly used for saturation vapor pressure in air at 1 atm and in steam calculations in closed systems with pure water without any air. These two cases differ to the extreme, but the same values apply to both. Papers on better numerical formulas for the calculation of the saturation vapor pressure for atmospheric applications have formulas that depend only on the temperature, not on the ambient pressure.

My impression is that this is true also for the Goff-Gratch formula. It refers to properties at boiling point, but as far as I understand that’s always the boiling point at 1 atm, not at the actual ambient pressure.

JimD, “captd, if you think the earth can find a way to radiate more heat without its temperature increasing you need to state that, because that is what the radiative balance needs when you add CO2. Water vapor just ends up just getting in the way of this rebalancing by exacerbating the insulating effect requiring even warmer surface temperatures to achieve the balance.”

Punch in US standard atmosphere and -50 for the temperature offset. From 70km looking down, check the OLR. Then kick the CO2 up to 37,000 ppm and do it again.

There are what is called Effective Radiant Layers, water vapor would have one and CO2 would have one, they are not located at the same altitude. Above the ERL the GHGs cool and below the ERL they warm. When H2O and CO2 get together, they work better than when they are separated. The atmosphere is not a nice milquetoast perfectly symmetrical static model, it moves around a lot. You are considering an ideal case to get the best/worse case performance. I deal in the real world.

captd, so how much do you reduce the outgoing radiation when you raise CO2 that much? How much do you have to raise the surface temperature at fixed RH to get it back to where it was before? I am familiar with the MODTRAN site too. [Answer: 12 C warming]. A similar thing with the tropical atmosphere gives 15 C because water vapor gets in the way of equilibrium more.

Pekka, “My impression is that this is true also for the Goff-Gratch formula. It refers to properties at boiling point, but as far as I understand that’s always the boiling point at 1 atm, not at the actual ambient pressure.”

It also considers heat of fusion so it is pretty good over ice as well. The biggest point is that you are looking for the saturation vapor pressure over water or ice. Clouds are made of water and ice. If you increase the surface temperature above the convection triggering potential, you stimulate convection. Since latent heat increases exponentially with temperature you reach a point of zero payback, you just get deeper convection. The 1997/98 El Nino was a pretty good example.

A typical reaction in these discussions. When an argument is found erroneous, another completely different one is introduced.

The formula for saturation pressure over ice is, indeed, different. At a temperature below freezing point it makes also a difference whether water is present as ice or as supercooled water, but these points have very little if anything to do with your previous argument.

Sometimes you present arguments that are difficult to understand, and therefore difficult to state as wrong with confidence, but You have recently made so many elementary errors, that I start to be convinced that there’s no need to take such arguments seriously at all, not even as a less likely alternative.

JimD, “captd, so how much do you reduce the outgoing radiation when you raise CO2 that much? How much do you have to raise the surface temperature at fixed RH to get it back to where it was before? I am familiar with the MODTRAN site too. [Answer: 12 C warming]. A similar thing with the tropical atmosphere gives 15 C because water vapor gets in the way of equilibrium more.”

You are not considering separate surfaces. If you have a water surface at 29C and you increased it temperature by 12C how much would you increase the latent and sensible cooling at the surface? So what good is raising the surface temperature at a fixed RH? That fixed RH assumption may be good above the ABL, but not at the real surface.

Also considered the lapse rate assumption. The ABL has the most turbulence and the ranges from nearly dry adiabatic to super adiabatic with and without temperature inversions. During the day the ABL boundary is controlled by convective mixing and at night temperature inversion as long as surface wind shear is low. You are not in simple average territory because nothing remains equal.

captd, the RH is fixed by the presence of the ocean. Why would you not let the ocean keep it fixed. Does it stop evaporating when it is warmer? This has nothing to do with insulation. You are using Onion ‘courage’ to avoid the issues.

Jimd, “captd, the RH is fixed by the presence of the ocean. Why would you not let the ocean keep it fixed.”

Really, The SST just outside my door has been the about the same for a month but the humidity varies. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it don’t. Some years there are lots of storms, this year not so much.

I guess you could ASSUME it is fixed, but then if that assumption starts to prove problematic, you should just bite the bullet and said that didn’t work. How those models working for ya?

captd, I missed the part where we switched from climate to weather. The ocean fixes the mean RH of the atmosphere in climate, unless the land is warming really rapidly, which I didn’t think you believed. If your whole argument is based on weather, I give up. It is not what this debate was about from my perspective, and we were completely at cross purposes.

Pekka, “The formula for saturation pressure over ice is, indeed, different. At a temperature below freezing point it makes also a difference whether water is present as ice or as supercooled water, but these points have very little if anything to do with your previous argument.”

They have everything to do with my point. When the actual SST reaches 29 to 30 C the latent and sensible energy released is nearly equal to the energy required to warm the water. To increase the temperature you would have to increase the pressure. Not only does CO2 not increase the surface pressure, the increased latent and sensible increases the rate of convection reducing the pressure at the surface. CO2 also does not change the temperature of condensation/fusion.

If you know the surface is near saturated, why assume anything, determine the saturation vapor pressure at the ABL. CC has not performed well at all in the tropics, why not consider another option? Or better yet, exactly what temperature do you think is the realistic maximum for the tropical oceans?

manacker, I think you are kidding (mocking the CH view), but I’ll play along. You will notice that the CO2 rate is increasing by 0.026 W/m2 per year while the burning rate is steady at 0.029 per year. Currently the CO2 rate is about 2 W/m2 and rising by 0.04 W/m2 per year, the burning rate is at 0.029 W/m2 and not rising at all.

So you weren’t kidding? The rate of change of CO2 forcing causes climate change. Its rate of change is currently 0.04 W/m2 per year. The rate of change of combustion forcing is zero. Similarly solar forcing which provides 240 W/m2 is the thing to compare with your combustion amount of 0.029 W/m2. Solar forcing has a rate of change which is quite small, so it is not currently accounting for any climate change.

Try calculating the energy efficiency of the burning of all those fossil fuels, and then the various forms of energy that the chemical energy from their burning is translated into. An energy diagram is most useful for this. A gram of petroleum or coal can go from chemical to kinetic to electrical to electromagnetic to gravity-potential to heat to bio, etc.

In thinking about all this, remember of course that fossil fuels represent the energy from stored sunlight from millions of years ago. What does it mean for the Earth system when additional energy from millions of years ago is added to the current system?

You really can’t be serious Jim. You have had this explained endlessly – and yet you remain stubbornly uncomprehending. Webby and FOMBS it goes without saying are utter idiots without the least understanding of atmospheric physics or energy dynamics.

With extra CO2 more energy is retained in the atmosphere. Warmth increases at the same rate of the increase in greenhouse gases – it is a function merely of the mean free photon path. The system moves always to energy equilibrium at TOA – a warmer atmosphere increases the radiation from the atmosphere. The energy increase in the atmosphere is equivalent to a rate of increase of 0.03 W/m^2. This is equivalent to the rate of energy released – and equivalent to energy released from radioactive decay – to the atmosphere by burning of fossil fuels. The latter are a source of energy that is retained in the atmosphere by increased CO2. It moves the system towards energy equilibrium at TOA.

CO2 forcing is calculated as the radiant imbalance at TOA from additional CO2 keeping the temperature of the troposphere constant. In reality of course the atmosphere warms and the system moves towards energy equilibrium at TOA.

Naive bloggers seem to actually believe that the forcing is real physics at TOA and not merely a metric enabling simpler comparisons. This topic started long ago as a question. Does the radiant imbalance ever exist at TOA or are there other energy sources sufficient to raise the temperature of the atmosphere such that the system moves towards energy equilibrium at TOA? A simple energy accounting seems to confuse them endlessly.

It is because they are idiot enough not to be able to understand that greenhouse gas forcing is not a physical reality but merely a convenient metric. Keeping the temperature of the troposphere constant is by definition not a physical reality. Energy is retained in the atmosphere by virtue of the reduced mean free photon path. The very minor but interesting in passing question is whether the energy retained is sourced form an initial radiant imbalance at TOA or from energy released in combustion and from radioactive decay.

I was tired of this discussion with uncomprehending fools long ago – I have certainly finished with this trivial topic.

manacker seems to have understood now, because he went away when I explained it to him.There is a difference between steady forcing like the sun and its little twin, combustion, and growing forcing like CO2. Only the latter type effects climate change. Put it this way. If you somehow eliminate all combustion in one year it would mostly cancel the growth in CO2 for that year, but then the following year CO2 is still growing and you have no combustion left to remove.

You have explained nothing but your misunderstanding of simple energy accounting. Let me say it again – forcing doesn’t increase temperature does. Both the energy of combustion and of radioactive decay is added to the atmosphere continually. It doesn’t stop – it doesn’t hide – it is more than the energy added to the atmosphere by added CO2.

It is utterly bizarre that you can’t understand this and persist with your usual silly space cadet science. Higher energy states in the atmosphere are maintained by reduced mean free photon paths.

Your persistence in this idiotic denial of simple energy accounting is noted.

CH, explain in your own words how you think solar heating is different from combustion heating, photons or not. Solar heating amounts to 240 W/m2 averaged over the earth, and combustion heating averages 0.03 W/m2 averaged over the earth. Both occur all the time and can be simply added to each other for their total effect.

Oh Pekka – I am disappointed that such a simple energy accounting escapes you. What is it – a warminista blind spot that perplexes even the well informed?

Let me explain yet again. There is a certain quantum of energy that is added to the atmosphere at a rate of 0.03 W/m^2. The atmosphere doesn’t really care whether this energy is from an initial radiant imbalance or from energy released in the atmosphere and from the Earth’ surface.

Let me stress yet again for the greatly uncomprehending that the energy is retained in the atmosphere as a result of a reduced mean free photon path as solar energy moves through the system.

Do you deny that energy added to the atmosphere is less than energy added to the system from combustion and radioactive decay? Does this mean that the atmosphere cools to the new and higher energy state rather than warms?

It is simple energy accounting that by no means has any effect on the idea of higher energy states in the atmosphere as a result of more greenhouse gases.

I noticed you were referring to this idea of forcing earlier. It is of course not a physical reality. It is an artificial metric that assumes that tropospheric temperature is kept constant. What actually changes is temperature which very quickly moves the system towards radiative equilibrium at TOA. The increase in temperature of the atmosphere is a function of the reduced mean free photon path. There is a decrease in IR flux form the oceans that result in energy content in the oceans increasing to equilibriate at some higher energy level. How long does it take the oceans to equilibriate? In the real world – ocean heat content seems to follow net TOA radiant flux closely – which in the mid term at lest seems to follow changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. So I am not entirely sure that is a sensible question to ask.

So again – I am surprised that you endorse the simplistic rationalsations of idiots like webby and jim.

Jim – the relevant metric is the extra energy retained in the atmosphere by extra greenhouse gases. It is in a higher energy state with extra CO2 as solar energy continues to move through the system. The question is – did the atmosphere warm or cool to the higher energy state? It is an excruciating simple idea. Gases are emitted at high temperature and cool.

CH, your explanation is not quite right, but let’s go with it. So you are saying that combustion is continuing to raise the atmospheric energy state with the heat from burning so the temperature would rise just from that. That part is wrong. Or you are saying that rising levels of GHGs don’t lead to temperature changes. That is also wrong. Which is it?

CH, the sun adds energy to the system, thousands of times more effectively than combustion. All this energy is also radiated out which is why a fixed solar and combustion heating rate don’t warm the earth. You won’t agree with this. The warming comes from preventing the heat escaping more effectively with more GHGs. With no GHGs you have 255 K. With GHGs you have 288 K at the surface. Adding insulation makes the difference.

Jim D and Pekka,
The Chief is a pretentious prankster who I find difficult to pin down. The fact that he can not deal with the well-accepted explanation of GHG’s — and how they can heat the earth by 33 degrees C based on atmospheric radiative physics and a stable atmospheric concentration — makes him fundamentally a denier.

Oh for God’s sake – we have already settled that it is the extra energy in the atmosphere – not the total freakin’ energy from the Sun. The extra energy accumulates at a rate of 0.03W/m^2. Gee whiz – I wonder what the rate of energy released to the atmosphere from combustion and radioactive decay is?

This seems to challenge some deep seated space cadet meme. Got no idea why. I refuse to again say that that the higher energy state is maintained by flows of solar energy.

This is again just an utterly bizarre case of cognitive dissonance. You are treading a fine line between madness and insanity Jim.

CH, at what rate do you think the Sun’s energy gets into the atmosphere or does it somehow by-pass it? Explain the difference between day and night air temperatures, for example, in your theory. Does combustion impact this explanation, or is it insignificant relative to daytime solar heating? (clue: yes)

webster – you have not a clue about how anything works. I thought we had established that?

The actual temperature would be some 100 degrees C cooler as ice spreads from pole to pole. In fact – the ice preceeds the gas changes which surely would not go to zero. Although I am not sure what Snowball Earth has to do with anything realistic or contemporary. But I suppose that’s the peculiar webster mind for you. He brings his wit to bear on any problem – well half of it anyway.

CH, so you think combustion heat is special and radiation can’t remove it from the atmosphere the same way as it does with solar heat every night? What makes it so special? Does it have special photons or does it cling onto the air molecules harder?

So you resort to farce – typical space cadet nonsense. There is extra energy in the atmosphere – combustion adds about the same amount to the atmosphere. You do know it is not the same energy all the time don’t you? Just on average more energy as heat moves through the system?

CH, you keep saying heat moves through the system, as it does, but somehow combustion energy gets stuck there and accumulates, does it? Why doesn’t it move through with the rest of the heat? Why doesn’t the solar energy accumulate? You haven’t thought this through much, have you?

Chief, All you have to do is defer your explanation to someone else’s interpretation. You seem to enjoy copying and pasting quotes, so I am sure you can find some passage in the literature that can articulate what you are trying to explain better than you can.

‘Nearly all energy used for human economy is, at some point, dissipated thermally within Earth’s atmosphere or land. This is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics – the tendency of energy towards higher entropy (more disordered) forms. Because the energy we derive from non-renewable sources (coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear) would not otherwise have been introduced to the Earth System as heat (on relevant timescales), it can be considered a climate forcing term. Globally, in 2005, this anthropogenic heat flux (AHF) was +0.028 W/m2, or only about 1% of the energy flux being added to Earth because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.’ http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/tss/ahf/

See this is a space cadet meme. The first is fairly obvious a constant 0.03W/m^2 forcing from combustion and about the same from radioactive decay. The second is just nonsense. The change in CO2 ‘forcing’ from pre-industrial was 1.7W/m^2 from memory. But is not the energy being added by greenhouse gases currently. Let’s go back to the definition.

‘The definition of RF from the TAR and earlier IPCC assessment reports is retained. Ramaswamy et al. (2001) define it as ‘the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave; in W^m2) at the tropopause after allowing for stratospheric temperatures to readjust to radiative equilibrium, but with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values.’

This is obviously not real physics but simply a convenient metric – what changes is temperature. Temperature increases incrementally and the forcing is offset. A further increase in CO2 results in increased energy staying in the atmosphere – and the rate of increase is 0.03 W/m^2.

The difference between you and me webby is that I actually know what I am talking about and you a total space cadet nutcase.

Now if you have some evidence that the atmosphere hasn’t warmed and current CO2 forcing is 1.7 W/m^2 – go right ahead.

“The change in CO2 ‘forcing’ from pre-industrial was 1.7W/m^2 b) from memory. But is not the energy being added by greenhouse gases currently.”

Insulation, which is not heat or energy above.

I think what you are saying is a) is not like b).

I also think the TOA has a few jobs. One is to emit heat and or energy. It does so 24/7. If we found some extra heat or energy laying around, after some lag it would pass through the TOA. It also does so to the 4th power as I recall, which I’ll think of as an exponentially increasing the more it is asked to do.

CH, you can look at the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram, or Stephens’ version if you prefer. The arrows there are hundreds of W/m2. Even sensible heat flux from the surface is ~10 W/m2. They didn’t put anthropogenic heating there because it would be 0.03 W/m2 and nothing like the others, and probably is even wiped out by the error margin in the sensible heat flux. Put it in that context, and don’t exaggerate its importance.

Forget insulation entirely – it is a nonsense that inhibits clear thinking.

Here’s an animation. CO2 and H2O interact with photons at certain frequencies. Most of these collisions – 93% odd result in changes in the kinetic energy – heat energy – of molecules. About 7% cause electron orbits to jump to a higher energy state absorbing a photon – and then relax releasing a photon. It all happens millions of times a second. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – the greater the number of interactions – called a reduced mean free photon path – and the longer energy stays in the atmosphere. The net energy increases but the average photon still passes through in nanoseconds.

a is definitely not like b. a is a forcing – b is a metric for comparison calculated keeping temperature constant – and cannot be used as a physical concept. What happens as you say is that warming happens and emissions increase to the fourth power – Steffan Boltzmann. You can’t have both warming and constant forcing. What happens is that an energy equivalent is retained in the atmosphere and oceans and the forcing is offset.

CH, you can look at the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram, or Stephens’ version if you prefer. The arrows there are hundreds of W/m2. Even sensible heat flux from the surface is ~10 W/m2. They didn’t put anthropogenic heating there because it would be 0.03 W/m2 and nothing like the others, and probably is even wiped out by the error margin in the sensible heat flux. Put it in that context, and don’t exaggerate its importance.

Utterly and idiotically irrelevant – and repeated for at least the 10th time. We are talking about the increase in heat in the atmosphere and oceans which increases at 0.03 W/m^2. The atmosphere is indifferent as to whether this comes from combustion forcing or from an initial radiant imbalance.

CH, to the atmosphere it doesn’t matter whether heat comes from burning something on the ground or through the ground heating from the sun. Both produce exactly the same types of thermals, and from there the energy is the same. You are making a false distinction between sensible heat and anthropogenic heating.

Putting forcing in with the others is where you go wrong. Forcing doesn’t do anything to climate unless it changes. The main forcing changing is CO2 and other GHG content (+0.04 W/m2 per year). Anthropogenic heating is not changing from year to year, and therefore not changing climate. I said this at the top, and now have to say it again. This is where manacker disappeared from the discussion, probably because he saw his error quickly.

Other issues have added to the confusion, but the main blind spot I referred to is in the influence of energy production and heat from the Earth interior.

Let’s consider a house that’s insulated and heated over a period of unchanging weather. It has been heated already for a long period with constant power.

How does the temperature in that house change in the following cases:

1. Heating with the same constant power goes on, insulation is not modified.
2. Heating with the same constant power goes on, a new layer of insulation is added once.
3. Heating with the same constant power goes on, a new layer of insulation is added every day.
4. Heating power is increased once and remains then at the new higher level. Insulation is not modified.
5. Heating power is increased every day. Insulation is not modified.

Does anyone disagree with the answers:
1. Temperature does not change
2. Temperature is increased after the addition and settles soon at a new constant value.
3. Temperature increases continuously
4. Temperature is increased after the change in heating power and settles soon at a new constant value.
5. Temperature increases continuously

Chief seems to think either that my answers 1 and 4 are wrong or that the analog with the Earth is not valid, probably the latter. If so, then I would like to hear, why it’s not valid.

Pekka, yes, I agree with these answers, and I think the insulation analogy works better than the greenhouse analogy for explaining the effect of adding GHGs as insulation layers. This draws attention to the fact that it is changes in insulation that lead to temperature changes, and in the absence of that you have a steady state. Changing GHGs is the main source of changing insulation. People only need to know how insulation works to understand this effect, and it connects it to practical engineering of the type seen at home.

CH, energy is also added by the sun on a continuous ongoing basis. Have you not yet seen the flaw in your argument when you describe anthopogenic heating in the same way as solar heating? This is ‘courage’ of the Onion type.

““It’s clear now that the President has declared a war on coal,” he added. “It’s simply unacceptable that one of the key elements of his climate change proposal places regulations on coal that are completely impossible to meet with existing technology.”

Manchin’s comments echoed remarks made by a member of a White House panel of outside science advisers, who told The New York Times on Monday that the president should use Tuesday’s climate speech to launch a “war on coal.”
”

“I was the first to call for a 100 percent auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter,” Obama continued. “That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

“I was the first to call for a 100 percent auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter,” Obama continued. “That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.” – Obama, 2008.

At times I find myself seemingly living in a parallel universe. “Meet the rigors of that market…” Which is hardly a market in the normal sense as it would be pushed down from the top, and pretty far from the voluntary ideal. “Ratcheted” above is probably one his poorest choices of a word. When you load a flatbed trailer, you can secure the load using chains or straps with ratchets to tighten them. To approach our markets with a ratchet. Brute force.

The Environmental Protection Agency will move ahead Friday with a rule requiring cleaner gasoline and lower-pollution vehicles nationwide, amounting to one of President Obama’s most significant air pollution initiatives, according to people briefed on the decision.

The proposed standards would add less than a penny a gallon to the cost of gasoline while delivering an environmental benefit akin to taking 33 million cars off the road, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made yet.

Oil industry officials, however, said the cost would be at least double the administration’s estimate and could add up to 9 cents a gallon in some places.

Jumping Jimmy Carter! With a crucial mid-term election in 2014, the last thing that President Obama and his Democratic Party would wish for is long car lines at gasoline stations or substantially higher prices at the pump. That is what the oil industry is forecasting if the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t roll back mandates for renewable-fuel use.

Although it’s Obama’s problem now, President Bush and the Congress passed a measure in 2007 that tried to address worries about domestic oil supplies and the country’s energy independence. Their solution was to boost the required amount of renewable energy sources like biofuels that refiners and wholesalers blended into traditional fuel supplies. The goal was to meet an ambitious target of 36 billion gallons of blended biofuel by 2022.

In his first journalistic foray since unexpectedly passing away on a cruise ship last week, Sir David questioned Nixon’s spirit during a four-hour exchange, nearly forty years after they first met in California.

‘I just dropped by to say hello, good evening and so on,’ said Sir David’s ghost, ‘but we ended up chatting for quite a while, and I of course tried to get him to say a proper ‘sorry’ for Watergate this time. But he just went on and on about what a brilliant tactician he was and how we all ought to be grateful to him. I pointed out that he’d been dead for twenty years and might want to think about letting go, but he wasn’t having any of it.’

Let’s consider a house that’s insulated and heated over a period of unchanging weather. It has been heated already for a long period with constant power.

How does the temperature in that house change in the following cases:

1. Heating with the same constant power goes on, insulation is not modified.
2. Heating with the same constant power goes on, a new layer of insulation is added once.
3. Heating with the same constant power goes on, a new layer of insulation is added every day.
4. Heating power is increased once and remains then at the new higher level. Insulation is not modified.
5. Heating power is increased every day. Insulation is not modified.

Does anyone disagree with the answers:
1. Temperature does not change
2. Temperature is increased after the addition and settles soon at a new constant value.
3. Temperature increases continuously
4. Temperature is increased after the change in heating power and settles soon at a new constant value.
5. Temperature increases continuously

Chief seems to think either that my answers 1 and 4 are wrong or that the analog with the Earth is not valid, probably the latter. If so, then I would like to hear, why it’s not valid.

I am quite commonly dubious of the pot’s on the stove analogies of global climate Pekka. Insulation aye? I think you lost me right there.

Add a slug of CO2 to the atmosphere – the reduced mean free photon path adds to the net energy in the atmosphere. .

1. Heat from radioactive decay enters the atmosphere and oceans at a constant rate adding to the energy content of the oceans and atmosphere.
2. It meets a unicorn and rides off into the sunset.
3. The big bad wolf huffs and puffs.
4. Energy from combustion, radiative decay and any residual radiant imbalance – positive or negative – adds to the higher energy state of the oceans and atmosphere. Much as we would infer from the first law of thermodynamics.

I think we can dispense with 2 & 3 – despite mosh’s penchant for unicorns. Valid analogy? It is utterly non physical and I can’t be bothered thinking about it at all Pekka.

You have yet to show any current data or research to back up your unsupportable claim that ocean heat content peaked in 1998. Anything from 2012 or 2013 would be fine. You can call me all the names you like– just show us the data. And please, not your study from 2003 showing heat FLUX from the ocean during the 1998-2003 time frame. Not relevant.

I’m still waiting for an explanation of why half the added OHC of the 0-700m layer from a 30 year long persistent forcing was added in just 3 years. I mean besides the calibration error explanation which would just be too obvious.

I’m still waiting for an explanation of why half the added OHC of the 0-700m layer from a 30 year long persistent forcing was added in just 3 years. I mean besides the calibration error explanation which would just be too obvious.
”

steven, It is because you either can’t do the math, or can do it but refuse to show it.

It gets tiresome to discuss science with chumps that think they can talk the talk, but can never walk the walk. Really, if you think you have a good argument, why don’t you write a working paper. Are you afraid of embarrassment? I can understand that considering the walking embarrassment that is Bob Tisdale.

Web, so now the data does show what I said it showed and you say it is because of volcanoes. We are making progress because you are now trying to deliver what I asked for which was a physical reason. I have to laugh because the next question is so obvious. Which volcanoes erupted and when to cause all that OHC to be added in such a short period of time?

Web, so now the data does show what I said it showed and you say it is because of volcanoes. We are making progress because you are now trying to deliver what I asked for which was a physical reason. I have to laugh because the next question is so obvious. Which volcanoes erupted and when to cause all that OHC to be added in such a short period of time?
”

At the end of the post I applied what is considered a more realistic forcing function as described by [J. Hansen, M. Sato, P. Kharecha, and K. von Schuckmann, “Earth’s energy imbalance and implications,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 11, no. 24, pp. 13421–13449, Dec. 2011]. Hansen created this forcing function with dips due to particulates produced by volcanic eruptions; these act to transiently reduced the solar forcing. The volcano from 50 years ago was called Agung.

You are mistaken that the heat was added — it was actually reduced and then rebounded after the particulates precipitated from the atmosphere.

Once again, I am either duplicating work that other scientists have already presented or verifying the results in slightly different scenarios. This uses Hansen’s forcing in an OHC context.

So you can either come after me or go after Hansen. It is odd that you think you have forced me into a corner, where it was actually you that ignored what I had already done.

Your whole argument is to point to a Bob Tsdale graph where he has a dip circled in the early 1960’s. Weak.

Tisdales circle has nothing to do with my comments. It isn’t even the right time frame. I’m talking about the 2001-2003 calibration period to ARGO. I suppose I should have spelled that out but I assume most people commenting about OHC would already know exactly what I was talking about. It isn’t like it is in today’s news.

I don’t remember pouting over anything you discovered, mr columbus. I remember being irritated because your lack of reading comprehension was translated into me making arguments I didn’t make. Now, do you have a physical reason for the OHC increase at the only place in the data set that fits my description or don’t you? If not stop being a gnat.

I’m no great fan of analogs, because they are often incomplete and misleading. This one is, however, perfect in the sense that writing equations for the two cases leads to exactly the same equations, not only roughly the same. Heat is heat in both cases, heating is heating in both cases and, insulation of the house and the atmosphere serve exactly the same purpose from the point of view of energy production.

Assuming that the house is insulated by modern insulating materials, the heat capacity of the insulation is so small in both cases that it makes almost no difference.

The house could be built using heavy materials in the walls, but even then it would not change the conclusion to the least. The same answers apply to a house where most of the heat capacity is inside of all insulation and to a house where the exterior walls have the highest heat capacity. I believe you must agree on that, when you look at the questions and the answers.

In case of Earth, the atmosphere is known to a have a small heat capacity in comparison to those layers of the oceans and continent that follow closely enough the surface temperature, when the issue is warming over periods long enough to be relevant for climate change.

The heat in all three cases – combustion, radioactive decay and radiant imbalance is added to the oceans and atmosphere. You add insulation and the house (Earth) warms. From changes in internal heat? Or because less heat is leaving the house (atmosphere) because the insulation is blocking it and the roof and insulation (atmosphere) allow SW in but less IR out?

Analogising something that is already inordinately simple in principle is an absurdity.

Any source of energy adds to the energy content, all that gets trough the insulation or to the space subtracts from that.

If the sources maintain a constant power and the insulating effect stays the same, the temperature remains constant assuming that there has been enough time to settle to the stationary level as there has certainly been for radioactive decay, and to a large extent for the other influencing factors.

Warming continues only to the extent the source power keeps on increasing or the insulation gets better. Only the changes matter here, changes in the power of combustion and changes in insulation or CO2 concentration.

“Chief Hydrologist | September 8, 2013 at 3:58 am |
I don’t think it is perfect at all. What we are discussing is the increase in energy content of the ‘insulation’.”

—-

The energy content of the full Earth system is the only metric that matters when talking about increasing energy. Increasing energy may appear in any form in any part of the system, with the vast majority of it being in the ocean. The atmosphere, or “insulation” of the planet mainly serves as insulation for the ocean, to reduce the flow of energy from ocean-source to outer space sink. Should the atmosphere insulation suddenly vanish, the ocean would quickly form an ice skin many meters thick which would also serve as insulation to reduce the flow of energy to space. In this ice planet scenario, the rate of flow of SW through the ice to the water below would also be reduced greatly, but natural tectonic heat might be enough to keep water in a fluid state under the thick ice perpetually, such as we see on some of the moons in the outer solar system.

Pekka – assume the atmosphere is in a steady state. Combustion adds both heat and CO2 to the atmosphere. The added CO2 holds more energy in the atmosphere.

The source of that energy is the minor but interesting question. Most CO2 emissions cool down from high flame temperature. It warms the surrounding atmosphere and emits in all directions. It cools to a local thermodynamic equilibrium with a higher energy content of the CO2 enhanced atmosphere. Combustion energy doesn’t cause the increase in energy content – CO2 does. Combustion provides a source of that energy. Given the quantum of that energy – there is no need ever for a radiant imbalance at TOA.

I realise that this is a startling new concept – but it is actually more of an intellectual curiosity than of any major practical import.

You have repeated that argument innumerable times. Every time you have been told that the effect is very small. It’s just the release of energy from combustion that we have been discussing all along. There’s nothing new in that, It’s understood by everyone who understands something about thermodynamics.

All the relevant arguments that I can imagine have already been presented to explain why the effect is small enough for being ignored. When direct arguments were not understood, I presented the analog of a house. If you still don’t understand what I and many many others have told, then I cannot really do anything else than stop trying.

I noticed that you seem to have a similar problem with the difference between rate of change and the resulting state in discussing what has happened to OHC around 1998. That year may have had a peak in the rate of change of OHC, but all data that you have shown tell that OHC kept on rising rapidly until 2003 or so.

I thought I would explain quite succinctly why heat added the system ends up warming the system. That would seem to be obvious. Yet you continue to imagine that it is only the increase in heat produced that creates a warming effect. This is new energy in the system and you might quibble about the quantum. In one case it is the total energy released in adding the CO2 – the other is the theoretical increase in atmospheric temperature of forcing from the added CO2. Not the total hypothetical forcing from all anthropogenic CO2. Work out the numbers for yourself.

And you know I ignored your silly little house analogy. If you have a fire burning in the house continuously and add extra insulation – the house warms. It seems utterly bizarre that this is such a difficult concept.

Yes the flux peaked in 1998 according to that graph. The average flux estimated from OHC changes remained high until 2000. This period from 1998 to 2000 forms a significant part of the rapid rise in OHC that Lyman and Johnson show. Thus the more recent Lyman and Johnson results are in rough agreement with the data used in that graph. Both tell that OHC did rise until 2003.

There is a story here about climate shifts and energy budgets. Ocean heat content peaking in 2003 seems unlikely – but it doesn’t change the story in any material way. Perhaps the oceans were absorbing enough energy from the atmosphere to make a difference.

Actually this is not true because that would be mostly offset by surface warming that increases IR to compensate. Surface warming has been observed so it should be having an effect. The idea is that over the long term, these trends should cancel. You can only see the effect of adding GHGs from its changing signature in the outgoing IR spectrum.

No – heat enters as sunlight and is lost through IR. The ocean processes are warm warm buoyancy and turbulent mixing.

‘Diffusion is one of several transport phenomena that occur in nature. A distinguishing feature of diffusion is that it results in mixing or mass transport, without requiring bulk motion. Thus, diffusion should not be confused with convection, or advection, which are other transport mechanisms that utilize bulk motion to move particles from one place to another.’ It is technically not diffusion but convection.

Delay
of
CO2
warming
by
the
ocean
can
be
illustrated
with
a
“box
diffusion”
model
(24),
in
which
heat
is
stirred
instantly
through
the
mixed
layer
and
diffused
into
the
thermocline
with
diffusion
coefficient
k.
Observed
oceanic
penetration
by
inert
chemical
tracers
suggests
that
k
is
of
order
1
square
centimeter
per
second
(2,
3,
24).

Yeah I explained how the ocean can warm in the middle without the energy going through the surface. It’s warmer runoff from the continents. As I’ve been saying for quite some time now downwelling longwave infrared cannot heat a body of water that is free to evaporate. Increased DWLIR merely increases the rate of evaporation, lowers the lapse rate, raises the cloud deck, and the raised height of the cloud deck allows for more efficient radiative cooling of the clouds.

Over dry land, especially in the winter when it is very dry, DWLIR actually does warm the surface. Winter begins later, ends earlier, and water that is warmer than normal but still colder than the ocean runs off the continents and sinks along the continental shelf until its density matches that of the ocean.

Once you come to understand that DWLIR has very little direct warming effect where there’s an unlimited supply of water for evaporation then all observations fall neatly into place. It’s a beautiful, elegant explanation and I defy anyone to produce expermental evidence showing DWLIR can heat a body of water.

This part is true because the infrared increases the temperature of the water. The increased temperature results in more CO2 and water vapor outgassing, which acts as a positive feedback due to these being GHG agents. The increased water vapor will raise the humidity of the atmosphere, including that of land, where the positive feedback is even stronger, as the land has weaker heat sinking potential.

There is some negative feedback due to lapse rate modification.

What I described is the standard explanation, which is at odd with Springer’s other assertions.

I find it is more helpful to think of net IR which has a cooling effect, while net solar has the warming effect. Net IR cooling is reduced by increasing the downward component with GHGs or clouds for example. This is seen on land too, or in lakes, buckets of water, etc. Dry clear nights are more conducive to cooling the surface because they have more net IR cooling.

” As I’ve been saying for quite some time now downwelling longwave infrared cannot heat a body of water that is free to evaporate. ”

And you have been wrong for quite some time as well.

The correct statement is that “downwelling longwave infrared” will heat a body of water.

This is physics, and the second law states that energy will disperse in many directions — some goes into heating and some goes into a phase transformation in this case. Unless you can provide an experiment and citations to what you are saying, no one should take you seriously.

Webster, “This is physics, and the second law states that energy will disperse in many directions — some goes into heating and some goes into a phase transformation in this case. Unless you can provide an experiment and citations to what you are saying, no one should take you seriously.”

Some this some that blah blah. If you heat a bowl of water from above the water will evaporate more quickly reducing the surface temperature. Less energy is transferred to the bulk. If you heat the bowl of water from the bottom, the water will heat more uniformly. If you heat clouds from above, they burn off. If you heat clouds from below they rise. Since 1985, about 55ppm CO2 have been added to the atmosphere and the tropical oceans have stayed rock solid in temperature and humidity. The tropical marine atmospheric boundary has dropped a little, irritating the heck out of coffee growers in Costa Rica. but water vapor and temperature are thumbing their nose at you theory.

OK, Cappy Dick,
You are directly refuting what Springer has asserted.
The fact that you now say that infrared radiation can indeed heat water opens up the likelihood that the approximate 0.5 to 0.8 W/m^2 of heat being absorbed by the oceans as measured by OHC experiments is being caused by the infrared trapping properties of GHG.

Webster, “OK, Cappy Dick,
You are directly refuting what Springer has asserted.
The fact that you now say that infrared radiation can indeed heat water opens up the likelihood that the approximate 0.5 to 0.8 W/m^2 of heat being absorbed by the oceans as measured by OHC experiments is being caused by the infrared trapping properties of GHG.

You can’t walk that one back.
”

Nothing to take back. It is all about the efficiency. That is what separates engineers from scientists. Our stuff has to work and be in budget.

The average temperature of the deep oceans is 4C and the average tropopause is ~-60 C. With a maximum SST of ~30C in the tropics the efficiencies are, 0.08 into the oceans and 0.30 to the tropopause. If you add 4Wm-2 of atmospheric forcing and only get 1Wm-2 of net surface impact you will only get ~0.25 Wm-2 of deep ocean impact. As surface temperature increases, the efficiency of heat transfer to the colder sink increases faster than the warmer sink. You add more convection, the tropopause sink can decrease to -90 C.

Pekka,
You forgot to insert the important word “net” into that sentence.
If you are talking “net IR”, then of course a hot body of water thermally insulated from its surroundings will lose energy and subsequently cool by emitting IR. In that sense, IR will indeed cool the water.

What more people need to understand is the concept of superposition. One can create fluxes that go in opposite directions and show that this is mathematically correct and useful for understanding heat flow. Remember, thermal energy does not respond to gradient forces (such as E-fields and gravity) — the gradient is the result of the concentration, not the cause of it. Superposition allows one to sum these flows and create whatever net flow actually exists in the system.

One can also use the concept of diffusion as an “effective” diffusion, and treat eddy turbulence as a process that looks mathematically just like regular conductive diffusion. So one can indeed get thermal diffusivities in ocean water that are of the same order as copper.

Mathematical abstractions are a wonderful tool for understanding the physics for what is happening. I never had a problem using these abstractions, because I long ago learned the utility of model semiconducting behavior as electron and holes. Someone like Cappy or Chief or Doc would see the concept of holes and claim that I was out of my mind. The problem with these people is that they do not understand how mathematics and models can help to understanding the behaviors.

While I don’t believe that the word “net” was needed here neither for correctness not for clarity, extra words are sometimes really useful. The case of “effective diffusion” or perhaps “diffusive mechanism” is a good example. It’s quite understandable that people don’t understand that concept.

Webster, “Someone like Cappy or Chief or Doc would see the concept of holes and claim that I was out of my mind. The problem with these people is that they do not understand how mathematics and models can help to understanding the behaviors.”

No, my problem with you is your assuming symmetry and initial conditions that are just plain ridiculous.. There are a lot of ways to solve problems correctly. You can compare the North Atlantic SST with the North Atlantic deep ocean temperature anomaly and determine the rate of OH uptake. You can compare the NH and SH absolute temperature estimates and determine there is a large hemispheric imbalance. You can compare that imbalance over time as see that it contribute to the “Global” mean temperature anomaly. You can compare the tropics to the NH and SH and see that the CC saturation pressure and assumed constant/near constant RH are just plain wrong.

You focus on a tiny portion of the problem then scream “Eureka!” like you have discovered something.

Phatboy, You and Springer are obviously deficient in your facility with modeling thermal behavior.

The disturbance is at the surface of the ocean and heat is diffusing downward through the ocean depths.

One only has to look at the data from the Ocean Heat Content studies and quickly infer what is happening. It points to excess heat that is collecting at a higher rate in the upper layers and that heat is propagating downward as an effectively diffusive flow.

This is a diffusive model that I generated compared to the Levitus data

I am not saying anything different than what Hansen had said back in 1981

What exactly is wrong with this fundamental view of the energy imbalance caused a GHG-induced thermal forcing?
You will need an alternate model to better what we have right now.

Cappy Dick claims that I am screaming “Eureka!” as if I am discovering something new. Not even close. What I am screaming about is how foolish that deniers like you appear to the scientists that know what they are doing.

Webster, “Cappy Dick claims that I am screaming “Eureka!” as if I am discovering something new. Not even close. What I am screaming about is how foolish that deniers like you appear to the scientists that know what they are doing.”

Then you should know that the rate of uptake is inconsistent with atmospheric forcing. If the SH warming started first and has run the longest, that would be solar forcing. Like I told you then, compare hemispheres.

Handwaving about how DWLIR can warm a body of water free to evaporate doesn’t make it so. You got your ass handed to you on a platter by other commenters. What I said remains correct and I continue to defy anyone to show me an experiment demonstrating the heating (or even insulting) effect of DWLIR on a body of water free to evaporate.

Good luck. And remember I said experiment not handwaving. No radiant heater heats water in that manner nor does any radiant heater even emit radiant energy in the ~10um range we’re talking about with DWLIR. There are some jim dandy mid-IR lasers which will suffice nicely though. Maybe someone with a lab and a budget for such things can undertake it.

Webfoot, FFS, read my lips:
The ocean gains heat from solar SW absorbed BELOW the surface layer
The ocean loses heat partly from IR radiation from its surface layer, the rest from evaporation and conduction from its surface layer.
Downwelling IR reduces the net energy flow FROM the surface.
Although the energy flow into the ocean (SW+LW) exceeds the energy flow from the ocean, the upwelling IR from the surface exceeds the downwelling IR to the surface, meaning the net IR flow is upwards from the surface.
As the surface layer is always cooler than the underlying layer, as it MUST be given the direction of net flow, ‘heat’ from the surface layer CANNOT diffuse downwards. ALL the diffusion is from the underlying layers, which absorb the SW, towards the depths AND TOWARDS the surface.
That’s plain, straightforward physics – don’t invent your own.

Webby understands nothing at all. He ‘models’ heat transfer from the atmosphere to the oceans using what he calls an effective diffusion. What he actually does is fit a curve to data that is in itself questionable – but even then losing both long and short term variability. Like everything he does – it is an utterly pointless exercise. And waffling on about semiconductors adds nothing to real world physics of oceans and atmosphere.

The facts are that oceans are heated by the Sun and lose energy in the IR, by conduction and by evaporation. The so called diffusion is actually a balance between turbulence and warm water buoyancy. This changes with wind and current speeds. It is far from a constant – something that is it’s most significant property.

What WHT does is not nonsense. It cannot replace more detailed and complex approaches, but concepts like the “effective diffusion” are helpful as they offer simpler approximate approaches for understanding some essential features of the Earth system. Such methods must, however, be used with care as the limits of their applicability are unknown, and as extending their use beyond their range of applicability may give totally false results.

Where WHT seems to fail is in explaining his approach to those who don’t have any former understanding of it including those who would be open for accepting the approach when presented clearly.

Where I have my doubts, is on the limits of applicability. There my views appear to deviate from those of WHT.

Utter BS Pekka. He uses incorrect physical concepts of ‘diffusion of heat’ from the atmosphere to the oceans and continues to insist this is real. He vaguely fits a curve to data – data that is in itself questionable – and you imagine that losing information by applying incorrect physics and incompetent math to smoothing data tells you anything of interest.

So we have incorrect physics and a smoothed curve. Surely this meets the test of the nonsensical and pointless.

I am the first to suggest that black box models have some utility. James Hansen used one in his 1981 paper to partition heat between the oceans and atmosphere. Webby is deluded enough to believe that the black box physics are real – and he has no purpose other than to smooth the data. It is interweb insanity which is seen all too often.

My impression is that neither of you is so badly or systematically wrong that the mutual slandering would be justified. Both of you could learn from the other, if you learned to understand what the other is saying.

I do often agree with both of you, and I do also often disagree with both of you.

Rubbish – he specialises in trivial curve fitting while inevitably missing the big picture on anything and is overweeningly self important, abusive and repulsive. It is characteristic of cult of AGW groupthink space cadets.

The suggestion is that I have not done enough to explain my work clearly enough. Since this is a simple comment area within a blog, I can understand the limited understanding one can get through this medium.

That said, I have a series of papers that I have written with colleagues available from the menu from this link http://ContextEarth.com.

— The first one is on the general stochastic modeling approach used to describe the environment (land, sea, and atmosphere).
— The second is an in-depth study of stochastic modeling applied to terrain and wave characterization.
— The third is on applying diffusion to characterization various phenomena
— The fourth paper is a description of the semantic web environment that I architected which puts these models together within an ontologically organized framework, and which you can interactively evaluate from the server link

This is all part of a heavily funded project which aims to simplify environmental models for use within analysis and design activities.

The recent bit I have added is to extend the semantic web to include energy and AGW topics.

I don’t want waste my time any further with this nonsense. From memory there are slopes, wave heights, wind speed, lake sizes, etc. These are all curves fitted to data. Pointless.

There is a carbon curve that is based on a slug of carbon and ‘diffusion’ into the oceans. Utterly imaginary. There are oil depletion curves that are purely irrelevant to global energy supplies. The ocean heat curve I have discussed – wrong physics and pointless results.

Entirely trivial and missing any depth of understanding of the central facts of climate. .

“Curves fitted to data” is the hallmark of scientific investigation. Name one scientific breakthrough that did not involve at some point verifying empirical results against a theory?

In the first paper I describe how statistical data of the order of millions or billions of points can be reduced to a concise model representation of a few parameters. This has implications for reducing the dimensionality of problem solving and for extrapolating to rare events.

What Chief is showing is petty jealousy brought on by his underlying manias. He should really learn how to control these demons of his.

Lets take waves. These are measured continuously using wave buoys. What you are really interested in is a ‘significant height’ or a maximum height in say a 30 minute window. Calculated as the signal comes in.

This gives 24 waves a day – which you can then process into a pdf of wave frequency. This is where webby comes in. He takes the pdf – imagines here are billions of data points and fits a curve to it. He calls this stochastic modelling. I call it incompetent math and fantasy physics.

You see there is no standard wave environment. Waves heights depend on fetch, water depth, wind speed and direction and wave interference patterns. To estimate extremes a statistical distribution that people have been working a century on is assumed. This then needs to be projected over local bathymetry using St Venants equations – a version of N-S – to determine local wave environments.

Stochastics are used in hydrology all the time – indeed as a key technique. To make any sense of this you need a broad understanding that is entirely lacking in webby. All of these series are nonstationary. The means and variances periodically shift. Not understanding this is ultimately very misleading. The point of it is that it is a mistake to lump together all the records without stratifying for periods of different oceanic influence.

You see the guy is a rank amateur working well outside of his expertise – if indeed he has any. This is not a cpu and a heat sink. What is really annoying – however – is the utter failure to acknowledge error – the self aggrandizing backed by nothing very interesting – and the repetitive whines about nothing really much.

The Chief hates knowledge. What I am doing with the Semantic Web environment is providing an architecture for hosting that knowledge. Underlying the architecture is a Prolog based knowledgebase which interacts with triple stores and rules.

I do indeed provide models of wave frequency based on empirical data. Chief disapproves of this like a.scold would. Kind of like the Church Lady.

My whole life is about broad knowledge and understanding. I used to be a dilettante – now I might actually know something.

Webby seems all about trivia and self aggrandisement. Waves were only one example. It is repeated endlessly and tediously. He is an amateur who spends an hour fitting a curve and imagines this means anything at all.

Downwelling IR does not affect evaporation in any other way than trough temperature. It leads to a higher temperature and the higher temperature leads to increased evaporation. The net effect is a higher temperature and more evaporation. The rise in the temperature is smaller than it would be without the increase in evaporation, how much smaller depends on the specific conditions, like the rate of removal of the additional moisture from the air near to the surface.

There’s also a direct relationship between the change in temperature and in the change in absolute humidity near the surface, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation.

We should always remember that heat is flowing predominantly from the ocean to the atmosphere, not vice versa.

We should also remember that IR does always cool the surface, not heat it, because emission from the surface occurs at almost full black body intensity over the whole spectrum, while the downwelling radiation is not nearly as strong at all wavelengths. Usually it’s weaker at all wavelengths, but in some exceptional cases it may be slightly stronger over part of the spectrum. The net is always from water to atmosphere.

The surface is cooled also by evaporation and convection helped by conduction in the immediate neighborhood of the skin.

The influence of additional downwelling IR is to reduce the net heat loss through the surface. That leads to warming both for the skin and fore the layers below. The temperature rises until a new balance is obtained. In the new balance the share of net IR in the heat loss is reduced while the shares of evaporation and convection are higher.

I wasn’t trying to contradict what you said. My point is that the ocean-atmosphere isn’t some sort of idealized model. It is very energetic and dynamic. There will be some mixing of the top 10 mm of surface water due to agitation. That will tend to heat the bulk ocean.

Actually the temperature is lower at the skin than slightly below. The warmest layers are not deep below, but they are a little (like a few meters) below the surface, because the surface is losing energy, while the heating is done by solar SW that’s mostly absorbed a few meters deep in the ocean. There might be some local exceptions when warm moist air is brought in, but such situations are so exceptional that they have no influence on the overall picture.

It is hard to see how, when the top 10 mm is undergoing a state change from liquid to gas, how it could be cooler. Is it because the evaporation that would occur without IR overwhelms the IR evaporation effect?

Here we can read that the two curves represent rather extreme cases (a) applies both to nighttime and to daytime during strong wind conditions, (b) to daytime low–wind speed conditions and high insolation resulting thermal stratification of the surface layers.

While most of the solar radiation penetrates a few meters, the shortest wavelengths penetrate much less. Under suitable conditions that leads to thermal stratification with a clear maximum at a depth of perhaps 1 mm as shown in (b). Over longer periods most of the heat absorbed at larger depths must be brought to the surface, otherwise the bulk of ocean would warm rapidly. Mixing by winds is the most important mechanism in that, but under calm conditions the temperature gradient would also have necessarily sometimes the sign that leads to convective heat transfer to the surface.

“Downwelling IR does not affect evaporation in any other way than trough temperature”

An assertion you have made before, and yet you have not provided a reference for this being experimentally determined.
Quite why two packets of equal energy, applied to the surface of a body of water, at 8,000 and 25,000 nm should have an identical effect on bulk thermalization and evaporation I find very difficult to believe.

There’s a lot of very well understood and verified physics for which it’s difficult to provide references, because it has been known so long so well that nobody has any interest in writing papers on that. A paper that just confirms something known so widely could not be published either.

I don’t make this kind of strong assertions without reliable knowledge on their truthfulness.

This particular detail might be extremely difficult to verify directly by experiment, but all the theory that proofs the assertion has been verified very well.

Pekka/Webster, notice how surface wind changes the skin temperature. That same surface wind also impacts the marine atmospheric boundary layer and relative humidity. C-C at the surface is just about meaningless when temperature and humidity change relationship.

The skin layer is cooler than the ocean below it. How’s that heat supposed to diffuse downward, Pekka? Last I knew 2LoT pretty much guarantees that heat flows from warmer to colder not the other way around.

Evaporation can occur without a rise in temperature. It isn’t the same as boiling. This is why the ocean skin layer is COOLER than the water below it. Your handwaving is not going to change the facts of the matter Pekka.

I noticed that you sometimes act like a scientist and other times you act like the southern end of a northbound horse.

Show me something concrete to support your majestic but very empty claim that DWLIR has a net insulating effect on the ocean. I’m waiting. So are a number of others. Don’t insult our intelligence with more handwaving and claims that this is so basic no one ever bothered to measure the imagined effect.

The skin layer is cooler than the ocean below it. How’s that heat supposed to diffuse downward, Pekka? “

Springer, heat does not flow because of a gradient (such as charged particles in a electric field gradient), the gradient exists as a result of whatever flow has occurred.

So presuming that a gradient can exist because of some previous thermal concentration, by introducing a thermal concentration at a point we can simply superpose the solution of that thermal forcing to the initial concentration. This can have the result of lowering the previous gradient as the heat disperses from the point source.

“Last I knew 2LoT pretty much guarantees that heat flows from warmer to colder not the other way around.”

Here is an experiment that has been done quite often in physics classes to show how heat can flow.
Take a metallic rod at a uniform temperature. Apply a heat impulse at both ends of the rod. The impulses are large enough to bring the rod to a higher temperature state before the thermal energy dissipates to the surroundings. One end has a large heat impulse, and the other end has a smaller heat impulse. Does the small propagating impulse, when it meets the large impulse, start to turn around and run backwards because it can’t violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics? No. Via the principle of superposition, we can generate independent solutions and then add them together at the end.

What is the effect of atmospheric back body radiation, AT NIGHT WHEN THE SUN IS NOT SHINING ON THE SURFACE AND THERE IS NO SHORT WAVE RADIATION, on the surface of non-turbulent water, by depth, in 10 mircon slices.

“In its draft report, the IPCC says it is ‘95 per cent confident’ that global warming has been caused by humans – up from 90 per cent in 2007.

This claim is already hotly disputed. US climate expert Professor Judith Curry said last night: ‘In fact, the uncertainty is getting bigger. It’s now clear the models are way too sensitive to carbon dioxide. I cannot see any basis for the IPCC increasing its confidence level.’

She pointed to long-term cycles in ocean temperature, which have a huge influence on climate and suggest the world may be approaching a period similar to that from 1965 to 1975, when there was a clear cooling trend. This led some scientists at the time to forecast an imminent ice age. ”
tonyb

Unfortunately, the warmists like lolwot and Jim D, will go on claiming that one year cannot break a trend. Even as the evidence piles up that the gloom and doom stories of CAGW are a load on nonsense, the IPCC seems to be hell bent on producing it’s own scientific nonsense report. I am afraid we will have to wait a lot longer for common sense to prevail, unless we can get some scientist with immense prestige, to stand up and say “Enough is enough”.

That phrase should have been uttered in 1998 when tree rings were elevated wildly above their station. My favourite Moroccan proverb sums up the apparent awe that some in the climate hierarchy (used?) to be held in which perhaps explains the silence

“if at noon he says it is night, will you say; behold, the stars?”
Tonyb

Unfortunately, the Arctic sea ice is very thin and vulnerable to weather and ocean currents, so it could do anything in the years to come.
But its thinness and consequent vulnerability probably didn’t come about over the last few decades – it’s a mere sliver compared to what it was millennia ago.

phatboy, you write “Jim, a few metres of ice may be enough to crush ships, but it’s not much against ocean currents and storm-force winds.”

I suggest you go to http://northwestpassage2013.blogspot.ca/, and read what actually happened, and is still happening, in the NW Passage this year. Then I suggest you may change your mind. Anecdotally, the ice in the north this summer is the heaviest in about 30 years

Judith Curry – a climate scientist acting like a scientist. I wish you were not travelling this road alone but greatly admire the fact that you have started the journey. Others will follow. It is the way of science.

This year reminds me of 2008 in terms of the reaction by “skeptics” to a rebound in sea ice from the very low year of 2007.

“Look! It’s recovering!”

Does it not scream at you so-called skeptics, that this is exactly NOT how a true skeptic would respond to one season or even a few seasons of sea ice behavior? Wouldn’t a honest skeptic always want to look at the longest period of data?

Being a true skeptic in the purest sense of the word, I would never “bash” a true skeptic. What I bash is fake-skeptics who can’t be honest even with themselves. One season is meaningless in terms of the long-term downtrend in sea ice, as natural variability creates far too much noise over such short term time frames. A true skeptic would never draw any conclusion from one season of ice behavior.

One, or even several seasons, is also far too short to infer any long-term trends.
The only thing one can say with confidence is that the ice is now a mere sliver compared to what it was several thousand years ago. And, as such, it’s very vulnerable to weather and ocean currents – and so it could go either way.

phatboy, you write “One, or even several seasons, is also far too short to infer any long-term trends.” R. Gates makes the same point.

Please note I said NOTHING about inferring anything about long term trends. I said the recent trend had been broken. One year can be suffucient to do this. Incidentally, no-one has the slightest idea what the long term trend is. The warmists are in danger of circular reasoning if they argue that CAGW produces low ice levels in the Arctic, and then claim that low levels in the Arctic prove that CAGW is real.

There is anecdotal data indicating that ice levels in the Arctic are now about the same as they were in 1971.

I wish I knew who he was talking to. As far as I can see, nobody here has said what he’s mocking. Am I missing something?

Though for the record, a recovery like this is not meaningless. More data gives us more information. This should cause expectations to be modified a bit. That’s what a true skeptic would do: Update their views as new data is found.

Being a true skeptic in the purest sense of the word, I would never “bash” a true skeptic. What I bash is fake-skeptics who can’t be honest even with themselves. One season is meaningless in terms of the long-term downtrend in sea ice, as natural variability creates far too much noise over such short term time frames. A true skeptic would never draw any conclusion from one season of ice behavior.
===========
So how many seasons are required to be meaningful? Because my guess is many, many more than the entire record at this point. Which would make ANY conclusions from the current record meaningless.

Gates, wouldn’t a true skeptic doubt all the data too? It is hard to see how a true skeptic could ever draw any conclusions. Sounds like a mental illness, like paranoid delusions or something, unable to trust anything. But then it is your made up concept so who knows?

What we can say from looking at the sea ice record is that it is consistent with global warming in general. Arctic sea ice has been declining, Greenland and Antarctic land ice has been declining and most glaciers around the world have been declining. Meanwhile ocean heat content has been increasing and this is all consistent with increasing greenhouse gases. The current pause in tropospheric temperatures is consistent with the rise of ocean heat content when one considers that so much tropospheric energy comes from the oceans. This slowdown in the rate of energy flow from oceans to atmosphere is an opportunity to improve global climate models in this regard.

“Meanwhile ocean heat content has been increasing and this is all consistent with increasing greenhouse gases”

This is why I’m reading about AGW here is to find out about it as I’m not a scientist or in the field but so far it’s just more confusion. I will certainly read you among the others here and hope I eventually find out.

There is another tropical storm brewing off the west coast of Africa. It would seem to be in the right place to develop into a hurricane, even a major hurricane. I would suggest that if it follows the same way as Dorian and Erin, then the chances of ANY hurricane forming in the NA this year are pretty small.

Here is an example of NOAA presenting statistical speculations as scientific facts:

“High temperatures, such as those experienced in the U.S. in 2012 are now likely to occur four times as frequently due to human-induced climate change.”
“Approximately 35 percent of the extreme warmth experienced in the eastern U.S. between March and May 2012 can be attributed to human-induced climate change.”

“William Polk, an ex-US State Department advisor, has written a meticulously detailed account of the genesis of the conflict over at The Atlantic. As Digby writes at Alternet, “It is the most cogent recitation and analysis of the Syrian crisis that I’ve seen.”

It is also an exceptionally detailed case study of how, exactly, climate change can directly influence—even precipitate—a violent conflict. Considering Syria’s path to war, step-by-step, provides a powerful breakdown of what might continue to happen in the future, so as long as the globe continues to warm, the food system continues to be in thrall to commodity traders and market swings, and vast swaths of the global population remain impoverished.”

First, please try to point to actual source materials, and not cheerleading 2nd sources. The accusation that CAGW is partly responsible for the Syrian crisis comes from an article in “The Atlantic” written by William Polk, in an online post by James Fallows.

Polk talks much about doubt and uncertainty, but then firmly picks a side just others he’s condemned for jumping to conclusions without adequate information have done. He makes the argument that because the chemical weapons attacks would not have benefitted the Assad regime, Assad must not have been the perpetrator. He concludes in a very weaselly way that rebel forces must have instigated the chemical weapon attacks in a “false flag” operation designed to attract international condemnation of the Assad regime. He offers no evidence of how rebel forces obtained chemical weapons, nor does he consider the possibility that Assad would benefit if terrorized opposition neighborhoods empty, their people fleeing to refugee camps in Turkey or Jordan, nullified as sources of support for actual opposition fighters. He mentions “home made” rockets, as evidence pointing away from Assad as the perp, completely ignoring the fact that Hezbollah guerilla fighters are part of the regime’s weaponry, and they could have been ordered to carry out such attacts with such rockets in order to muddy the truth of the chain of custody.

In the “context” section of the article, Polk claims that drought caused food and livestock failures, which in turn caused massive population shifts from rural to urban Syria, where poverty and local food shortages contributed to the environment of revolution against the Assad regime. That argument makes some sense, and if the argument was stated in this way, I’d concede the point. An extended drought that causes crop failures, livestock death (which he says was 85%, a figure I find implausible), and population shifts can certainly put pressure on social, economic and political systems. But in the context section, Polk presumes the drought to be caused by AGW, something not in evidence. And he completely ignores the synergistic nature of social media and populism underlying other anti-authoritarian uprisings in the Middle East, from Tunisia, Lybia, Egypt, Iran (Green Revolution), Bahrain. These didn’t even get a mention in his analysis. In this, Polk joins with Trenberth and all those CAGW alarmists who now seek to capitalize on the emotional politics surrounding every killer storm or weather condition. We’ve always had killer storms, droughts, floods and fires. Did Polk do or read some definitive study to see if drought is rare in Syria? Not according to his analysis. The area is a desert. Might there be a long history of droughts? Nor does Polk seem to have considered that perhaps a growing population in Syria without an adequate political economic support BECAUSE of Assad’s authoritarianism may have caused many of the same pressures, even without a drought. In other words, Polk making a tendentious argument, seeking to put all tragedies at the feet of those he opposes politically.

In general, it’s dangerous to draw conclusions from faulty or insufficient information. And that’s why it’s still wrong to blame isolated weather events on AGW. This article is non-persuasive as to AGW being a contributor to the revolution in Syria or the chemical attacks. It’s about as stupid and pointless as the recent hyperbolic arguments that claimed “Climate Change Kills Polar Bear.”

“The extremely low Arctic sea ice extent in summer 2012 resulted primarily from the melting of younger, thin ice from a warmed atmosphere and ocean. This event cannot be explained by natural variability alone. Summer Arctic sea ice extent will continue to decrease in the future, and is expected to be largely absent by mid-century.”

“The magnitude of the extreme rainfall experienced over southeastern Australia between October 2011 and March 2012 was mainly associated with La Niña conditions. However, the likelihood of above-average precipitation during March was found to have increased by 5 percent to 15 percent because of human influences on the climate.”

They are claiming not just to have solved the AGW attribution problem, but to have done so for specific local events. Statistical analysis gone mad.

“The influence of additional downwelling IR is to reduce the net heat loss through the surface. That leads to warming both for the skin and fore the layers below. The temperature rises until a new balance is obtained. In the new balance the share of net IR in the heat loss is reduced while the shares of evaporation and convection are higher.”

That’s a lovely hypothesis Pekka. It makes a prediction. As a scientist you know the drill from here, right? Let me refresh your memory if it’s been too long since you’ve done any experimental science. Design an experiment to test the prediction. In this case you could also point me towards an experiment someone else performed (and which was replicted) or you could show me a practical application that depends on the effect you hypothesize exists.

DS,
Two buckets of water. One under clear sky at night, one under a raised canopy, but exposed to the same air temperature. Which cools faster and why? It is just a physics question that a student might get to test their understanding of radiative effects. Let’s assume the bucket materials have insignificant heat capacity themselves to keep it simple.

CH. Fail. The air temperature alone does not limit their temperature change. The ground surface, for example, cools faster than the air at night. Being a more effective IR emitter than air, it responds to the IR balance, while the air mostly cools by contact with it as its own IR emission is inefficient. That is why the fastest cooling air is nearer the ground, not higher up. Similarly water surfaces.

JimD, “CH. Fail. The air temperature alone does not limit their temperature change. The ground surface, for example, cools faster than the air at night.”
Sure, the skin layer at the surface cools faster than the bulk, same with water, but water can transfer energy more efficiently to the skin layer than soil, so there is less skin layer cooling. You can get frost on your car a little above freezing if left outside but not under the carport. If you completely block all radiant cooling, you can get about a 6 degree temperature difference.

captd, I think you are making my point. Leave a bucket outside or under your carport and it will also get cooler outside, skin layer or no. In fact that cooler surface water will sink (if it is still warmer than 4 C) and be replaced by warmer water making the surface cooling rate more, not less, efficient in terms of the bulk cooling.

JimD, “captd, I think you are making my point. Leave a bucket outside or under your carport and it will also get cooler outside, skin layer or no. In fact that cooler surface water will sink (if it is still warmer than 4 C) and be replaced by warmer water making the surface cooling rate more, not less, efficient in terms of the bulk cooling.”

There is a big difference between cooling rate and temperature change. Water more easily transfers energy to the surface but also can contain up to five times a much energy as soil. If the clear sky bucket is losing 20Wm-2 more radiant energy than the cloudy sky bucket, there may not be much temperature change at all. This is the same deal with ocean warming. It has a lot of heat capacity and emits a lot of energy. If you add 4Wm-2 equivalent insulation to a thermally massive surface capable of radiating 400 Wm-2, you will get a small increase in temperature that takes hundreds of years to restore balance.

captd, you can work it out. 20 W/m2 over six hours is 432000 J/m2. Let’s take a 1 meter deep bucket. That is 432000 J/m3 or 432 J/kg. Divide by the heat capacity of water 4200 J/kg/K and you get about 0.1 K as the cooling for the whole meter, or 1 degree if it is the top 10 cm, or 10 degrees if it is just the top cm. What happens depends on the mixing. A steady 1 W/m2 over a year has 70 times this much effect. Not small.

CH. Fail. The air temperature alone does not limit their temperature change. The ground surface, for example, cools faster than the air at night. Being a more effective IR emitter than air, it responds to the IR balance, while the air mostly cools by contact with it as its own IR emission is inefficient. That is why the fastest cooling air is nearer the ground, not higher up. Similarly water surfaces.

The reason you get a frost on the carport rather than the car is because that’s where the moisture is. You specified equal air temperature. I assumed that the canopy was no barrier to heat. That is it warms to the ambient temperature and radiates. The situation of clouds/no clouds is entirely different and results in changes in the local temperature profile.

As for your totally stupid narrative about ground and surface temperatures. You are as I said an utter and trivial twit.

CH, you can put the canopy over one of two identical buckets at the beginning of the night, if you want it to be a controlled experiment. I prefer a canopy to captd’s carport, because it can be movable.

Jimd, “captd, you can work it out. 20 W/m2 over six hours is 432000 J/m2. Let’s take a 1 meter deep bucket. That is 432000 J/m3 or 432 J/kg. Divide by the heat capacity of water 4200 J/kg/K and you get about 0.1 K as the cooling for the whole meter, or 1 degree if it is the top 10 cm, or 10 degrees if it is just the top cm. ”

The rate decreases with the small skin effect temperature differential, but yes there is radiant cooling and if you were in some desert with very dry air you could get up to 40Wm-2 if I remember correctly more than in the humid mid-latitudes. Dr. Spencer has a pretty nifty Sky Dragon Slaying experiment going on, if you checked the link.

The point to remember though is that water vapor is also a green house gas and water is dead in its radiant spectrum. Averaged Globally, there is only ~20Wm-2 of radiant window with nearly zero window in the tropics from the actual surface. From above the atmospheric boundary layer there is ~40Wm-2 globally averaged atmospheric window. The average temperature differential at the tropical SST is about 1 C and the average diurnal temperature range is about 0.8C at the surface and about 4C at the ABL. So trying to make numbers fit without considering that turbulent first few kilometers that have all the temperature inversions and unstable air is kind of important.

I doubt that your controls mean much at all. Canopy? Perhaps put one under a roof open on all sides and one nearby in the open. It is really just a stupid little thought experiment – that you have failed to think through.

What I assume you are trying to say is clouds reduce IR losses from the surface. This is not news.

CH, the canopy is anything that shields the sky, like a tent without sides, or it could be a nearby tree. However it does modify the downward IR, so this experiment checks the effect of changing downward IR on a water surface. Some people think downward IR has no effect on water surfaces, so this might help them see that it does.

CH, more IR down is more IR down and it is what you get when you have a cover or tree over your surface compared to nothing but clear sky. Why is that so hard to understand? I am sure anyone else still reading this understood several comments ago.

JimD, “captd, can you get a cover to emit less IR than the clear sky? That is what it would take to make the water under it cool faster.”

Paint a sheet of foil with black high emissivity paint 99.9% on one side and white 99.9% on the other side. Even at night there is some background light and the foil with high e paint should give you the broadest possible radiant spectrum . It would depend on the local conditions, but yes, you should be able to simulate a colder sky.

If you want more radiative cooling, then high e. The object is to get the “roof” to be the worst possible insulator. With water in the bucket and there is bound to be water vapor in the air, the high e black surface would absorb all wavelengths emitted by the bucket. The top would emit all wave lengths and the foil should provide spectral broadening. Dr.Spencer has been able to get about 6 degrees below ambient temperature with high high e white painted styrofoam coolers. He shouldn’t be able to get below the dewpoint temperature, but that is not too bad.

If you pick a really dry night, the evaporation will limit the temperature change anyway.

‘Two buckets of water. One under clear sky at night, one under a raised canopy, but exposed to the same air temperature.’

You specified the same air temperature but now say that the air temperature is higher under the f_cking tree? That was the irony I was pointing out.

The only thing I agree on is that both you and webby are utter morons with a line in idiotic, misguided and misleading analogies. These silly ideas distract from the real physics of oceans and atmosphere and you end up with internally inconsistent nonsense that you seem to actually believe. It is the most pathetic display of false, pointless and ridiculous analogising I have ever seen.

captd, high e means it emits like a black body at its own temperature which would be the air temperature at its height. That temperature is sure to be warmer than the effective temperature of the open sky. So, high e doesn’t help you. The water stays warmer. I don’t know how to get something to emit with less than the clear-sky effective temperature unless it is refrigerated.

JimD, “captd, high e means it emits like a black body at its own temperature which would be the air temperature at its height. ”

High e both emits and absorbs at a higher percentage. That is the whole blackbody concept. Low e would absorb less therefore emit less. That is one of the problems with radiant barriers in tropical climates. Once there is condensation on the barrier it goes from low e reflective to high e absorptive. If you can design a one way smart e coating you might get famous.

As it is, you have the atmosphere that is kind of a smart e system. Water vapor has a broader spectrum with high heat capacity and limited to the near surface. CO2 has a lower heat capacity and smaller spectrum and well mixed. Water/ice/water vapor near the surface contain heat within a range limited by convection then allows energy through the near surface ABL. radiated energy above the ABL can only impact the the top of the ABL other than a small slit in the spectrum. You have an average 20Wm-2 slit (atmospheric window) at the surface and a larger 40Wm-2 slit above the ABL. That is the huge difference in the Stephens and K&T energy budgets, you lost half your scary warming at the real surface :)

JimD, the one under the tree would cool less quickly because the temperature of the tree would be higher than the temperature of a clear night sky. There may not be a huge difference though if the air is humid.

captd, OK, that takes you out of CH and DS camp, thankfully. Maybe you can have a go at persuading CH. DS never showed up and he was the one asking for an experiment in the first place. Perhaps you can come up with an experiment for DS to persuade him too.

There is not a chance that the tree is at a different temperature than the surrounding air. Downwelling radiation is a myth – radiation is in all directions randomly. At ground level – the temperature of air is the measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules and IR photons are bouncing all over the place. The second law applies.

This monumentally stupid thought aberration would expire naturally if it were not for intransigence and stubborness of an obnoxious know nothing little knob.

I am having fun insulting him – and he just keeps coming back. As opposed to his smarmy little passive aggressive jibes. It is otherwise extremely tedious as he seems to lack any of the basics – makes things up as he goes – and seems never to have read any real science in his life.

Chief, “There is not a chance that the tree is at a different temperature than the surrounding air. Downwelling radiation is a myth – radiation is in all directions randomly. At ground level – the temperature of air is the measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules and IR photons are bouncing all over the place. The second law applies.”

What is funny is that the average error of the DWLR measurements is about +/-7 Wm-2. That is most of the available “window” for actual radiant transfer at the surface. If you just use temperature and Carnot you have about the same range of error. The tree though has more thermal mass than the air and will cool slower than the ambient air producing an impact on the bucket’s rate of heat loss. A building or block wall to the side of the bucket will change the rate of heat loss. If the bucket is sitting on a metal plate with high e, the conduction from the bucket to the metal plate will speed cooling.

But with all that noise, the tree will cool slower because it has greater thermal mass. Clouds cool slower because they have greater thermal mass :)

Chief, “Oh and Dallas – the cloud effect is absorption and emission.”
Thermal mass/specific heat capacity is a factor, the less heat they can contain, the less they can absorb/radiate. A two foot thick adobe wall is better than a 1 foot thick wall. Lapse rate depends on specific heat capacity.

That is the neat part of Dr. Spencer’s experiment, he uses styrofoam coolers with high e white paint coating. There is very little thermal mass so he can get the temperature below ambient without much trouble. Kinda of doing the Greenhouse experiment in reverse.

Chief, I am sorry you don’t appreciate the analogy, but without the ability to hold heat an object can’t emit heat. Surface stations are not located close to walls and under trees for a reason. Since we were only discussing night cooling, the thermal mass/ specific heat is a factor in my opinion.

Presumably the canopy acts as a radiant barrier. I’d recommend conducting the experiment with a mylar foil emergency blanket as the canopy.

Instead of a bucket use a thick-walled styrofoam container open at the top. This won’t completely negate ambient air and ground temperature difference but it will help a lot. The ground will cool slower under the canopy and influence water temperature otherwise. Make sure the air is moving through both spaces at typical ocean breeze speed say 1 meter per second. In still air the canopy will cause ambient air temperature and humidity difference.

Once you get all those factors controlled you should find both vessels cool at the same rate but there will be more water lost to evaporation under the canopy because the greater DWLIR under the canopy will retard radiative heat loss but accelerate evaporative heat loss.

An easier and more accurate (but more expensive) way to do this is to do it in a lab and use mid-infrared IR lasers to precisely vary the DWLIR. It’s easier to control for other things when you can spread an infrared laser beam to precisely illuminate a circular water surface with a precise amount of power. Doing it outdoors with a radiant barrier is frought with problems in isolating the variable of interest i.e. DWLIR effect on a body of water.

“There’s a lot of very well understood and verified physics for which it’s difficult to provide references, because it has been known so long so well that nobody has any interest in writing papers on that. A paper that just confirms something known so widely could not be published either.”

That’s 100% unadulterated BS. There are texts, scanned and searchable now by way of Google Books, from the 19th century describing the march from hypothetical to experimental verification to the theoretical. I often refer to John Tyndall’s work “Heat: A mode of motion” when I need to show some clown how long some bit of physics has been known. Show me, Pekka. No handwaving. The literature is all there going back to Maxwell, Clark, Boltzman, Loschmidt, and all the other movers and shakers in classical physics from mid-1800’s. Put up or shut up.

I don’t make this kind of strong assertions without reliable knowledge on their truthfulness.

This particular detail might be extremely difficult to verify directly by experiment, but all the theory that proofs the assertion has been verified very well.

Pekka: “Downwelling IR does not affect evaporation in any other way than trough temperature”

Doc: An assertion you have made before, and yet you have not provided a reference for this being experimentally determined.

Quite why two packets of equal energy, applied to the surface of a body of water, at 8,000 and 25,000 nm should have an identical effect on bulk thermalization and evaporation I find very difficult to believe.

—————————————————————————————–

So you boys in the medical business put a lot of new drugs on the market based on well established theoretical efficacy?

Net irradiance is certainly a factor – regardless of the wavelength. If we presume that energy flows from the Sun to the oceans and from the surface to the atmosphere – increased downward IR reduces losses to the atmosphere. The net irradiance is essentially a flux of heat to and from the surface which certainly has an effect on evaporation.

The real question is how quickly the oceans equilibriate. The answer is equilibriate to what. The system is always changing in significant ways and is never in equilibrium.

Now then, how about that modern data (2012 or 2013) that shows ocean heat content peaked in 1998?. You must understand how important this data is to me, as a Skeptic and warmist, my main motivation is to find all data that would refute or cause me to alter my warmist perspective. C’mon Cheif, help me out!

In the ERBS/ISCCP era this was predominantly SW change. In the CERES era – this was again dominated by SW changes. Eyeballing both Willis et al 2004 ocean heat content (shown in Wong et al graph) and ARGO from von Schuckmann – it appears that ocean heat content peaked in 1998. The annual resolution of the Willis data is the critical point.

Yet you still remain a twit, Chief. Why do you go back to old data that can’t possibly show us heat content over the past decade? Moreover, the chart you use show net heat flux, not heat content, and of course it ends in 2003.

Big time disappointment Chief, I thought you actually had some data that would back up your often repeated (apparent) falsehood that ocean heat content peaked in 1998.

Big time fail for you Chief. Now why don’t you go scour the internet to try and find data to support your unusual viewpoint. It will be an eternal search as I suspect that your viewpoint is unsupportable by any of the data.

‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ AR4 WG1 3.4.4.1

The Willis Ocean heat content referred to above (and shown in the graph below) is consistent with the independent TOA flux anomaly datasets. ARGO after 2003 is far more relevant.

The big changes were in shortwave. 0.7W/m^2 cooling in IR, 2.1W/m^2 warming in SW between the 1980’s and 1990’s. The anomalies changed in the 1998/2001 climate shift with more cloud reflecting more energy back into space. MODIS/CERES shows a modest decrease in cloud and and SW last decade. There were negligible changes in IR anomaly last decade.

You’ve shown no proof of your contention that ocean heat content peaked in 1998. The worked up charts and graphs you’ve linked to show no such thing. Furthermore, not one expert on the subject would agree with your outrageous contention.

Your a nutter Chief, pure and simple, and might find a new career writing fiction.

‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980’s and 1990’s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/projects/browse_fc.html

Exceeds by a lot. I suppose that you will object that it is a power flux?

Singer is an atmospheric physicist with a PhD from Princeton. He was a leading figure in early space research, was involved in the development of earth observation satellites, and in 1962 established the National Weather Bureau’s Satellite Service Center. He was the founding dean of the University of Miami School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences in 1964, and held several government positions, including deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, and chief scientist for the Department of Transportation. He held a professorship with the University of Virginia from 1971 until 1994, and with George Mason University until 2000.

You don’t blow off somebody like Singer with handwaving. Especially handwaving from undistinguished clowns like Pekka Pirila and Paul Pukite.

Singer has a physics PhD from Princeton and decades of relevant experience in atmospheric physics and environmental science at high levels in both government and academia. You’ll forgive me for not delving into malicious unsupported accusations of malfeasance by alarmist phuckwads whose disagree with him.

“Singer is a serial denier and has published little, if any, peer reviewed climate science in the last 20 years. He has spoken out as a scientific expert on subjects including secondhand smoke, acid rain, ozone depletion, nuclear energy, pesticides, and the environmental impacts of nuclear war. ”
Dealing in Doubt
Greenpeace USA, 2013
page 14

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

According to the Penman equation latent heat loss increases as net irradiance increases. That’s exactly my point. The increase in net irradiance brought about by higher DWLIR increases latent heat loss. It does not sensibly heat the water under ordinary circumstances. Only shortwave can do that because shortwave penetrates beyond the cool skin layer where thermalization can take place. In the top 10 micrometers where practically all DWLIR is absorbed is immediately peeled off as latent heat of vaporization. The liquid isn’t warmed by DWLIR it is evaporated. Enthalpy of the troposphere is increased. This results in a lowered lapse rate which causes the dewpoint altitude to rise and the higher cloudtops cool more efficiently because there is less radiative restriction at the higher altitude and at the same time there is more radiative restriction between cloud bottom and ocean surface.

This explains all observations from soup to nuts including a small but measurable increase in OHC that does not appear first in the mixed layer. That’s because it’s entering the ocean through warmer runoff from the continents where GHGs work as advertised insofar as surface warming is concerned because there is not a practically infinite supply of liquid water on the surface to evaporate.

It’s clear that heating only the surface by IR leads to a stratified surface layer where the warming effect is limited almost totally to a very thin layer at the. There should not be any disagreement on that.

The situation is totally different, when the surface is cooled by net IR both before and after the change in downwelling IR power, and when water is continuously heated at larger depths. It’s different because heats moves much more easily up than down, because no persistent stratification is possible, and because slowing down the continuous flux of heat is effective while creating a flux downwards is extremely ineffective.

Your comment is true for a specific experiment, but tells nothing about oceans.

“It’s clear that heating only the surface by IR leads to a stratified surface layer where the warming effect is limited almost totally to a very thin layer at the (surface).”

Well that only took a year or so.

Now we have an ocean surface, say the top meter, and a very thin skin, <1 mm, and IR is radiated out into space.
The Ocean skin surface, is heated by IR radiation AS IT IS TRANSPARENT TO VISIBLE LIGHT. The main input of IR radiation is from the atmosphere, which radiates IR with a black body temperature of about 280K 24 hours a day.
Now all we want to know, w.r.t. to increasing the levels of CO2, and increasing the atmospheric temperature, and increasing the amount of IR black body radiation, is how is the energy absorbed by the <1 mm skin layer transformed?
Does the, EXTRA CO2 induced increased, IR radiation absorbed by the < 1 mm skin layer increase the rate that water evaporates?
Does the, EXTRA CO2 induced increased, IR radiation absorbed by the < 1 mm skin layer slow the rate that heat is transferred from the 0-1 m surface layer to the <1 mm layer, and then to the atmosphere, on its way to outer space?

These same graphs have been presented also previously, surely also one year ago.

Once more: The skin is not heated by LWIR, it’s cooled by LWIR.

The layers below the skin get warmed by solar radiation. Under calm conditions the warming is strongest near the surface at depths where the longest important wavelengths get absorbed. Those wavelengths are in the near IR where the intensity of solar radiation is still large. These wavelengths are, however, significantly shorter than the important wavelengths of thermal IR or LWIR that’s usually discussed when IR is mentioned.

When IR is absorbed by liquid matter, a few atoms take the extra energy as kinetic energy. That can happen at all wavelengths, because the molecules are so close to each other that satisfying the requirement of conservation of both momentum and energy is possible. (In gas only specific transitions to vibrationally excited states are allowed by the requirement of conserving both energy and momentum.) As the molecules are so close to each other, that additional kinetic energy gets almost immediately shared by the neighboring molecules.

All the time some atoms do also emit IR photons giving up some of their energy. Only atoms very close to the surface may emit photons that escape through the surface. The layer is the same as that where LWIR is absorbed. Under all conditions possible in the oceans more photons are emitted than absorbed. The rate of forming molecular states that allow for emission of photons is huge, by a factor of billions larger than the number of actual events of absorption and emission, because those states are also destroyed so rapidly by further interaction with neighboring molecules that emitting a photon is an exception as outcome, just as a vibrationally excited molecule in gas loses it’s excitation through emission only in one case in billion. In liquid the ratio is even larger than that one billion due to the shorter distance between molecules.

Near the surface the molecules and atoms within collide with each other all the time. Very rarely relative to that rate an IR photon is emitted or absorbed. In the immediate vicinity to the surface molecules may get enough energy and upwards momentum to leave the liquid, that’s evaporation. That happens only for the molecules at the surface, but for them that’s a much more common event than emission of IR. Other molecules from the moisture of the air just above hit often the surface and get adsorbed back to the liquid.

All these things go on with an incredible frequency, emission and absorption of IR are just rare events separated by billions of the more common events. Therefore the rate of emission is not directly influenced by the rate of absorption, but only trough the skin temperature (skin, because all this happens in the skin). The skin temperature is in turn determined by the temperature of the near surface layer.

Superposition states that retarding a flow outward is equivalent to increasing a flow inward, with a suitable offset. This is a convenient abstraction because we do not want to solve the ongoing steady state, instead what we want to solve is the perturbation to the steady state.

I am sorry, but this is the way I was taught to solve physics problems, to look for symmetries and lean on the simplifications inherent in those symmetries.

That’s a lovely hypothesis. The scientific method begins with hypotheses. In this case you want it to end at the hypothesis too. That is what is commonly called “a just-so story”. A claim without experimental verification. Story telling. Narrative science. Who do you think buys that shiit as good science, Pekka?

The just-so stories you see presented by alarmists are the same thing you get in evolutionary biology. Things are presented as true without any basis than “well it just is” because the alternative is philosophically unacceptable. DWLIR is fully thermalized in the ocean. Nothing but handwaving supports this assumption. Law and chance created the library of congress from a cosmic cloud of dust that collapsed under gravity to form our solar system. Nothing but handwaving supports that assumption either.

“It’s clear that heating only the surface by IR leads to a stratified surface layer where the warming effect is limited almost totally to a very thin layer at the. There should not be any disagreement on that.”

It’s also clear that in situ there is no heating at all. The top 1mm is consistently measured to be about 0.3C cooler than the water below it. That’s the opposite of stratification due to warm water floating over colder water. The cool skin layer can be broken up by white water in a breaking wave but it reforms in about 10 seconds. You have to deal with the facts not what you think the facts should be.

I have consistently described situations where the skin surface temperature is lower than the temperature just below as true for oceans.

In laboratory the surface may be warmer, when it’s heated by high enough IR flux. For this reason I have told, that such experiments are irrelevant for the ocean.

Another point is that the maximum temperature may be very close to the surface like 1 mm deep in the water. That may be true under calm sunny conditions. As long as such conditions persist there’s stratification at depths below this temperature maximum. During those periods the skin is warmer than otherwise and evaporation is also stronger because of this increase in temperature. The heat that maintains the higher rate of evaporation and the higher skin temperature comes from that part of solar radiation that’s absorbed within a few mm from the surface. A stronger downwelling LWIR from the atmosphere helps by reducing heat loss as net LWIR.

Downwelling radiation is an abstraction in the GHG theory — whereby the application of superposition of flows (in often opposite directions) allows one to reason about how temperature changes.

It is clear that there is not one downwelling radiation flow, as the downwelling will fractionally turn into an upwelling and that will become a downwelling, ad infinitum. Yet, like a geometric progression problem can be solved by a mathematical abstraction, so can these heat flow kinds of problems.

Webster, “It is clear that there is not one downwelling radiation flow, as the downwelling will fractionally turn into an upwelling and that will become a downwelling, ad infinitum. Yet, like a geometric progression problem can be solved by a mathematical abstraction, so can these heat flow kinds of problems.”

There ya go, DWLR is an abstraction or reference. If DWLR increases more than OLR, the net is reduced. Engineers typically like to deal with the tangible instead of the abstract. At the TOA there is approximately a 0.6 Wm-2 change in the net meaning that up to 70% or ~0.42 Wm-2 could be taken up by the oceans due to all causes. Engineers also do not expect CO2 forcing to be 100% efficient.

Power and spectrum of IR that hits the surface is measurable, it’s not an abstraction. The same is true for any location within the atmosphere.
”

OK, we are now back to the superposition principle. The measurement is a summation of all impinging photons. And then one can consider all escaping photons and subtract those. That is superposition. It is not that difficult of a concept to comprehend.

The Penman equation applies to open water surfaces – although there are variations for land. The temperature input refers to surface temperature. The net radiation is essentially a heat flux to the water column – remembering that this is an empirical equation. How the heat flux works is irrelevant to the calculation – but it works by decreasing IR losses from the surface causing the water column to heat up and evaporate more. The skin is irrelevant in a sense – it merely shows that net IR is upward. The skin is incorporated into the mixed layer on an ongoing basis – replaced with warmer water – which loses energy in nanoseconds. Much faster than the mixing rate – is why the skin is cooler.

Ultimately the oceans will warm until losses equal the slow change from greenhouse gases. How long until the ocean equilibriates? Never – it is always chasing changes in TOA radiant flux.

‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html

The rate of evaporation is determined by the conditions at the water/air interface:
– temperature, which is essentially the same for water and air, and
– rate of removal of moisture, which is determined by humidity at some distance from the surface and winds.

The temperature is in turn determined by
– temperature and heat balance in water, these determine the flux to the surface as function of the skin temperature
– rate of evaporation and sensible heat transfer through the skin determined according to the above paragraph
– net IR that cools the skin

Many details of the problem vary from case to case, further assumptions are needed to have a unique case that could be solved using CFD codes. There are also problems in applying CFD, because some of the essential processes occur at molecular scale where Navier-Stokes is not valid. Thus some special handling of those processes would be needed. As far as I know there are also gaps in basic knowledge in what concerns those processes.

The basic phenomena that I have discussed in several comments are not qualitatively sensitive to these details, but full quantitative calculations based on theoretical understanding alone cannot provide accurate results as far as I know.

===========

For simple relevant laboratory experiments that tell about these effects I would propose:

1) Influence of downwelling IR on cooling of water. That could be done filling a well insulated but open bucket with water of some given temperature, placing a cooled plate above leaving enough space for a constant controlled air flow between the water surface and the plate. Then the temperature of water should be measured at several depths. That experiment should be repeated for several temperatures of the plate keeping the plate always colder than the initial water temperature.

2) Otherwise the same experiment but heating the bucket with constant power from below.

In both cases the temperature of the plate should have a clear influence on the changes in the water temperature at all depths, but not in a third experiment similar to the first one but with a hot plate that leads to warming of the skin. In this third experiment the rest of the water would warm extremely slowly.

The rate of evaporation is dependent proportionately on temperature and inversely on humidity. To increase rate of evaporation you increase temperature. More water vapor increases humidity of air and you need higher thermal energy (temperature) to evaporate more water.

So in reality water temperature increases with evaporation. LWIR can warm the water even when evaporating. You have to reach saturation temperature to evaporate and it keeps getting higher as saturation pressure increases due to higher humidity until it reaches equilibrium. Then rate of evaporation stops increasing and extra heat flows to lower layers of water increasing the temperature.

The ocean surface is cooler than the water below it by about 1C. This is called “the cool skin layer”. It is about 1000 microns thick. It can be temporarily disrupted by breaking waves but reforms in about 10 seconds. There is no diffusion of heat from the skin layer downward because heat does not flow from colder to warmer. DWLIR is almost completely absorbed in the first 10 micrometers of the ocean surface. Not only does it not heat water below 1mm in depth it doesn’t warm even the skin layer itself. It simply peels water molecules off from the surface and creates a colder layer that is 100 times thicker than the depth at which absorption effectively reaches 100%.

This hypothesis predicts then that CO2 sensitivity is about 1/3 of that which is incorrectly modeled by assuming that all DWLIR is thermalized as OHC instead of rejected as latent heat. Thus the modeled sensitivity of 1.5C – 4.5C will turn out to be 0.5C – 1.5C. This also predicts that sensitivity is higher over land than water, that sensitivity increases over land as latitude increases due to evaporation being shut down when the land surface is frozen. It also predicts OHC will increase below the mixed layer without passing through the mixed layer because the asymetric land/ocean sensitivity means that continental runoff will be warmer and this will enter the ocean along the bottom following the continental shelf downward until the its density matches that of the ocean.

Science is about best explanations. Occam’s Razor is about the simplest explanation usually being the correct explanation. I believe this hypothesis is the simplest and best explanation for what we actually observe.

You never bother with limits do you? How much of the extra heat flow to the lower layers over what time frame? If there is extra heat at some point in will flow in all directions if you are using a diffusion model. How much flows in the horizontal plane? That is a big point since there are no true isothermal layers.

Webster, “Poor old Cappy is unable to work out any mathematical physics. It must really suck to be a bottom feeder.”
I can work it out quite well with a simple static model and specific heat capacities. It is not rocket science. I can even estimate maximum impacts using Carnot efficiency. You on the other hand seem incapable of simple stating any frigging thing. I personally think you are into fat tails because you have one.

David
You cannot generalize that ocean surface is 1 C cooler than water below it because temperature is a function of heat energy balance. You have to solve the energy equation:
Heat inflow – heat outflow = net heat transfer

If net heat transfer is positive, the surface is warming. The equilibrium temperature is the surface temperature when net heat transfer = 0

Ocean surface is heated (inflow) by LWIR and cooled (outflow) by convection. The observed value of LWIR (8-30 microns) in the tropics is about 100 W/m^2. The convective heat transfer coefficient of water is between 20 to 100 W/m^2/K. So the net heat transfer in ocean surface is positive (warming) until it becomes warmer than water below it and equilibrium temperature is reached.

Evaporation will occur when the surface reach the saturation temperature and will stop when the air becomes saturated with water vapor, which is usually at 30 g/m^3.

It is hard to believe your simplistic equilibrium conceptual model of ocean-atmosphere heat transfer has practical use for understanding the dynamic, deterministic climate system.

David plays a complete nutjob, a drunk, a misanthrope with dilusions of grandeur and a wannabe machoman, so I understand your skepticism. However, I’m not convinced that some of his rantings about LWIR getting spit back from the surface tension layer. It may have something to do with the unpopular theories of Gerald Pollack.

Note line Q-lw which is longwave radiation. It’s negative everywhere and is about -50W/m2 in the tropics and sub-tropics tapering off to near zero at the poles.

The ocean is cooled by IR not warmed by it. Pekka said as much in one of his first reponses. In that he was quite correct. This is Earth Energy Budget 101 stuff and you clearly haven’t taken the class. So how about shutting the phuck up instead of talking out your ass?

David
Your obscene language and poor reasoning show that you’re uneducated or perhaps some education but lacking in good manners. Please, I’m not here to trade insults. But you don’t even understand the charts you cited. See Fig. 2 – SST Daytime. Below 1 mm is cooler than surface. What does it mean? The entire 1 mm top layer can transfer heat by convection to layers below it. Your claim that the surface is cooler and cannot transfer heat below it is wrong.

Look at Fig. 5-7 longwave radiation. Of course it’s negative (cooling) because that’s LWIR coming out of the water. I’m talking about LWIR from the atmosphere going to the sea. That’s part of Qsw – heat transfer to the ocean by insolation. You can clearly see Qsw is positive (warming). Just as I said.

The outcome from heating water by IR from above depends on whether convective (and turbulent) mixing is induced in the water or not. Heating with a hot iron at a short distance is rather strong and not uniform. Therefore it leads to convective mixing and rises the temperature of the whole volume of water. If the power is strong enough in comparison to heat removal through evaporation from the surface and removal of the moisture to maintain a low enough humidity near the surface, the temperature may rise to the boiling point. Approaching the boiling point is likely to make convective mixing even more efficient.

In absence of convective mixing heat penetrates the lower layers very slowly because heat conductivity of water is not that good without convective mixing. Stratification of layers based on temperature gradient is an barrier against convective mixing. Thus there must some kind of bifurcation when the strength of mechanisms that drive convective mixing is varied. For lower values of the strength parameter stratification builds up and convective mixing is absent while the opposite is true for higher values of that parameter. The physical nature of that parameter depends on the overall settings.

What WHT has been discussing all along are situations where convective mixing is present. That makes the effective heat conductivity much higher than normal heat conductivity. A simple model of oceans that’s based on effective heat conductivity and related effective diffusion of salinity can explain some features of the ocean, but is certainly incapable of explaining many others. For a fuller picture the heat and salinity transfer mechanisms must be described in much more detail. As turbulent mixing is an important mechanism the concept of effective diffusion may have an important role also in this more complete description.

Net up IR is 398 W – net down is 345. IR is always net up – and as this happens in the top millimetre. This ‘skin’ as it called is always cooler than the water below and the oceans are always losing energy to the atmosphere.

Warming of oceans can theoretically happen – but it is by another process entirely. Warming by shortwave – mixing by turbulent eddies and warm water buoyancy – and a slowing of energy losses in the IR.

Look at Fig. 5-7. Subtract longwave radiation to insolation, Ssw – Slw
The difference is positive (warming). The surface is heated by LWIR. Just as I said.

Qsw is not part of LWIR, QLW is the net of absorption and emission of LWIR by oceans. That net value is negative, thus the oceans are cooled by LWIR at all latitudes. The net of all radiation including solar SW is positive at all latitudes.

The latent and sensible heat transfer are both negative and must bring the global average to essentially zero when all measurements are done accurately enough. At the present the measurements are not that accurate, and the discrepancy is large.

Pekka – it makes the ‘experiment’ a very poor analogy for real Sun/ocean/atmosphere physics.

I suggest as well that ‘black box’ models using a diffusion coefficient are a very poor way to investigate turbulent mixing. On the other hand – 3D modeling of the oceans in sufficient detail is an impossible task. As Lorenz said 30 years ago – we ‘may believe, for example, that the motion of the unsaturated portion of the atmosphere is governed by the Navier–Stokes equations, but to use these equations properly we should have to describe each turbulent eddy—a task far beyond the capacity of the largest computer. We must therefore express the pertinent statistical properties of turbulent eddies as functions of the larger-scale motions. We do not yet know how to do this, nor have we proven that the desired functions exist’. Safest to stick to real world data.

In one way of looking at the word “safest” it’s safest to admit that we cannot model accurately the oceans or the atmosphere, let alone the whole Earth system.

Sticking with the safest and forgetting everything else is, however, not necessary safest for other possible uses of the word, not is it necessarily wisest.

The models are very far from perfect, our knowledge of how good they are is also very far from perfect. The issue of modeling turbulent flows is always a practical one as the models are never perfect. Models are developed and tested in various ways. When testing is easy, the accuracy of the models can be found out, when it’s difficult and mostly indirect as it is for Earth system models, only crude and largely subjective estimates can be presented on the accuracy and reliability. Those who use the results in further research or in practical decision making should understand that, but that doesn’t mean that they should just dismiss the results totally, when other sources of information are also seriously lacking.

“The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.””The winds change the ocean currents which in turn affect the climate. In our study, we were able to identify and realistically reproduce the key processes for the two abrupt climate shifts,” says Prof. Latif. “We have taken a major step forward in terms of short-term climate forecasting, especially with regard to the development of global warming. However, we are still miles away from any reliable answers to the question whether the coming winter in Germany will be rather warm or cold.” Prof. Latif cautions against too much optimism regarding short-term regional climate predictions: “Since the reliability of those predictions is still at about 50%, you might as well flip a coin.”

Chief, I am no expert in bifurcation theory and chaos, and therefore cannot comment on that. What I see is that the behaviour of the global climate system is clearly oscillatory and that there are ‘cycles’ of various lengths.

“The good news may be bad news for the Federal Reserve as it considers when to begin scaling back its stimulus.

While unemployment dropped last month to 7.3 percent, the lowest level since December 2008, the decline occurred because of contraction in the workforce, not because more people got jobs. Labor-force participation — the share of working-age people either holding a job or looking for one — stands at a 35-year low.

The reduced workforce “poses a problem for the Fed,” said Roberto Perli, a former central bank official who is now a partner at Cornerstone Macro LP in Washington. “The unemployment rate is coming down faster than the Fed thought, but it’s not declining for the right reason.” ”

Correct. But it increases evaporation at the same time and the absorbed DWLIR is thus carried straight away insensibly in heat of vaporization. If the absorbed DWLIR doesn’t diffuse downward then it must somehow be carried upward because it sure as hell can’t accumulate in a 10um surface film. DWLIR is some 300 Watts/m2. A 10um layer of water 1 meter square is 0.1 cubic centimeters of water. Pumping 300 Watts of energy into a tenth of a cc of water vaporizes it in an eyeblink. You must account for where that energy goes. Think McFly!

Actually what you wrote isn’t correct. DWLIR reduces radiant heat loss from the ocean. It has very little effect on net heat loss because the reduction in radiant heat loss is compensated for by latent heat loss. Latent heat accounts for the vast majority of ocean cooling and is still a majority of combined land/sea cooling. See here:

I already did explain how OHC is increasing. Warmer runoff from the continents. That even explains how it gets below the mixed layer without detection by ARGO on the way down.

So the bottom line is you were again just making crap up, then you tried a literature bluff, I called it, and you lost. You’re such a phuck up it’s hard to imagine how you’re employable in a technical profession. Are you married to the boss’ daughter or something?

“Environmental Protection Agency officials have from the beginning of President Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office “pursued a path of obfuscation, operating in the shadows, and out of the sunlight,” according to a Senate report.

The report by Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee provides a detailed description of violations of the Freedom of Information Act and other federal laws and regulations meant to encourage transparency and accountability in the government.

“The agency established an alias identity to hide the actions of the former administrator; has purposefully been unresponsive to FOIA request, oftentimes redacting information the public has a right to know; and mismanaged its electronic records system such that federal records have been jeopardized,” the report said.
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“Moreover, EPA’s leadership abandoned the historic model of a specialized public servant who seeks to fairly administer the law and has instead embraced a number of controversial tactics to advance a secretive agenda,” the report said.

In addition to multiple abuses of the FOIA, the Senate report claims EPA officials have sought to cover up such activities when challenged by congressional oversight officials.”

The skin layer is cooler than the ocean below it. How’s that heat supposed to diffuse downward, Pekka? “

Springer, heat does not flow because of a gradient (such as charged particles in a electric field gradient), the gradient exists as a result of whatever flow has occurred.
————————————————————————————

Of course heat flows due to gradients. Warmer to colder. Until temperature is equal or in the case of something actively heated or cooled, which requires work (physics definition of work). Are you being willfully ignorant or truly ignorant of heat engines? Weather is the result of work being accomplished as heat flows across temperature gradients fercrisakes. The earth has uncountable temperature gradients from the core of the planet to the edge of the atmosphere. The working fluids are everything from liquid iron and rock to water (including ice) and gases. On the surface water is the real workhorse. There’s a reason it’s still widely used today in heat engines it’s a phucking good working fluid due to very high heat capacity of steam.

Webby’s a freakin’ nitwit. Energy flows from the Sun to the surface, to the atmosphere and out to space. It does not flow from the atmosphere to the oceans. There is turbulent mixing and warm water buoyancy in the oceans.

The mathematical abstraction is that heat is flowing into the surface layers of the water and diffusing downward. A forcing function of a time varying heat impulse can be used on a 1D (vertical) formulation of the heat equation to show how the thermal energy propagates downward. This nicely describes what is actually happening in the OHC studies.

Knock yourself out trying to place this into ambiguous English language sentences, I don’t really care.

OK so heat enters via sunlight. The transport of heat is a balance of warm water buoyancy and turbulent mixing. The latter seems to have changed last decade because of stronger trade winds in the central Pacific.

We need a curve to fit to the data? One that assumes diffusion and not the actual physical processes? He keeps repeating this idea but it doesn’t actually mean anything. He pretentiously calls it a mathematical abstraction but it is just curve fitting.

“Radiative flux is a function of temperature. Because iron is hotter than water, more IR arriving at surface than leaving. That’s why I predict it will heat up. Unless it just evaporates but I predict it will not happen because the air above water will become saturated with water vapor and evaporation stops.”

RH over the ocean is seldom saturated. Fog happens but not as much as you might think. Generally saturation doesn’t occur until convection transports the vapor to a couple thousand feet msl and adiabatic cooling takes temperature down to the dewpoint.

Guys
You can do a simple experiment at home to test whether LWIR can heat water or the water will just evaporate. Your flat iron emits LWIR 8-20 microns at 200 C. The flux at 700 W and 0.31 emissivity of iron is 217 W. Get a bowl with the same area as the flat iron. Pour a glass of water (250 ml) to the bowl and put a thermometer in the water.

Switch on the iron and place it one inch above the water surface. The heat of vaporization of water is 2260 J/g. The iron emitting 217 W of LWIR can theoretically evaporate 250 ml of water in 43 minutes. Wait for 45 minutes and see what happens.

Hypothesis 1: No change in water temperature and it completely evaporates in 45 minutes
Hypothesis 2: Water temperature rises to 100 C and it boils after 45 minutes

I think I burnt the cookies. Either that or the fish is too big for the oven. I have thought about this before and can think about seventeen different ways about it. I’m inclined to the fish/oven bit.
======================

“Don’t you have to ensure that more IR is leaving the surface than arriving?”

Radiative flux is a function of temperature. Because iron is hotter than water, more IR arriving at surface than leaving. That’s why I predict it will heat up. Unless it just evaporates but I predict it will not happen because the air above water will become saturated with water vapor and evaporation stops.

Water’s thermal conductance sucks big time. Heating from the top won’t convectively mix downward because warmer water is less dense. Thermal conductance is glacially slow. So how does the heat diffuse downward?

For simple relevant laboratory experiments that tell about these effects I would propose:

1) Influence of downwelling IR on cooling of water. That could be done filling a well insulated but open bucket with water of some given temperature, placing a cooled plate above leaving enough space for a constant controlled air flow between the water surface and the plate. Then the temperature of water should be measured at several depths. That experiment should be repeated for several temperatures of the plate keeping the plate always colder than the initial water temperature.

2) Otherwise the same experiment but heating the bucket with constant power from below.

In both cases the temperature of the plate should have a clear influence on the changes in the water temperature at all depths, but not in a third experiment similar to the first one but with a hot plate that leads to warming of the skin. In this third experiment the rest of the water would warm extremely slowly.

=====

My conclusion presented in the last paragraph differs from the alternative 2 of Dr. Strangelove. I didn’t give a number for that experiment, to indicate that it’s not as relevant for the influence of downwelling IR from atmosphere as the two numbered ones. Similar situations may, however, be created by solar radiation in particular when the water is not clear and the impurities lead to absorption of solar SW near the surface.

captdallas, sorry to disappoint you but it did boil! Try it yourself. I read your blog. Sorry again but you will fail college physics with that explanation. Carnot efficiency is for heat engines that convert heat to mechanical energy. A flat iron is not a heat engine in case you don’t know. It converts electricity to heat. The inefficiency of heat engines is due to heat loss. But the output of the iron is heat. Use the 1st law of thermodynamics. Heat is not lost by the iron because it is conserved.

BTW your ‘greenhouse water vapor effect’ is wrong because the ‘atmosphere’ in the experiment is only one inch thick. The IR absorption length of water vapor is a bit more than that.

Dr. Strange, “Carnot efficiency is for heat engines that convert heat to mechanical energy. A flat iron is not a heat engine in case you don’t know.”

Carnot Efficiency is a reference. It is not Carnot’s Law. Based on a sink at temperature Tc and a source at temperature Th, you can reasonably expect “useful” work up to 1-Tc/Th.

The flat iron is not being used as a flat iron it is being used as an infrared heat source. Carnot efficiency does not consider the emissivity of the source or the absorptivity of the sink, the capacities of either or the path between the two. It is just a reference.

“Based on Carnot Efficiency I would expect this to that”.

“BTW your ‘greenhouse water vapor effect’ is wrong because the ‘atmosphere’ in the experiment is only one inch thick. The IR absorption length of water vapor is a bit more than that.”

There is more to life than IR and IR absorption is based on “mean free path” At 100% or more relative humidity, there can be radiant transfer in the first millimeter of that path.

I made a comment in the last sentence about conduction. The container can get warmer enough to transfer heat even if it is a poor conductor.

Personally I don’t have the patience to watch a glass of water sitting under an iron very long, but after ~10 minutes there was no noticeable change in the temperature of the lower part of the glass while the rim was PDH.

Strangelove is lying. The water won’t heat up unless the heat is conducted from source to the water. Even Pekka knows that. Warm water floats so even if evaportion isn’t possible because air is 100% RH a 10um skin layer will heat to boiling and nothing will stop boiling except higher pressure which won’t happen in an open vessel. A 10um layer is so thin there won’t be any visible turbulence. You’ll see fog rising off the surface because the 212F vapor will quickly condense when it mixes with ambient air.

Strangelove revealed his/her deep ignorance when he/she said the ocean is heated by IR. The ocean is cooled by IR by about 50W/m2 in tropics and subtropics and tapers off to near zero at the poles. Nowhere over the ocean is there any net heating by IR. The argument is whether or not DWLIR slows heat loss. Heat enters the ocean by shortwave not longwave. Water is perfectly transparent to shortwave but impurities aren’t so depepending on turbidity sunlight penetrates anywhere from 1 to 100 meters before it is completely thermalized.

“Warm water floats so even if evaportion isn’t possible because air is 100% RH a 10um skin layer will heat to boiling and nothing will stop boiling except higher pressure which won’t happen in an open vessel. A 10um layer is so thin there won’t be any visible turbulence. You’ll see fog rising off the surface because the 212F vapor will quickly condense when it mixes with ambient air.”

The open ocean on the average has turbulence due to eddies and wave action so that surface heating can get transferred downward. From there it can further effectively diffuse and disperse.

Springer, your idol Singer is a mouthpiece for disinformation. You took what Singer asserted, hook, line, and sinker. Congrats.

Way back in ca. 2006 – 2007 I looked at viscous dissipation in GCMs. There are discussions starting from about that time frame on Real Climate, The Blackboard, Pielke Sr., an olde blog of mine ( danhughes.auditblogs.com ), Climate Audit, and maybe other places. An example of the discussion at 2009 is here There are a few comments associated with that post. In that post I mentioned papers that I find useful are Becker 2001, Becker 2003, and Burkhardt and Becker 2006. There is an earlier article by Fielder; Fiedler B. H., 2000: Dissipative Heating in Climate Models. Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 126, 925–939, but I haven’t paid the bucks to get it.

Becker seems to indicate that the real physical dissipation in the atmosphere is about 2 W m-2. A not-so-small number.

I have also mentioned from time-to-time that the original Saltzmann / Lorenz equations do not contain an accounting of the conversion of motion to thermal energy: viscous dissipation. And have wondered what might be the effects of including the term in the Saltzmann / Lorenz approach. The GCMs seem to use the thermal energy form of the energy conservation equation; the temperature of the fluid is determined by the equation. If the equation used in the GCMs does not include an accounting of viscous dissipation, the model does not conserve the energy of the fluid. Specifically, the local temperature change due to dissipation, and it is always without exception an increase in the temperature, is not accounted for.

The dissipation issue is also associated with The Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings concept, and discussion within this context can be found scattered around the Blog Universe. Especially at Pielke Sr. and Real Climate, and maybe at my olde Blog. Generally, within the frame work of the Lorenz model equations the Flap itself cannot increase the temperature of the fluid; the term is not in the thermal energy representation of the energy conservation model equation. Further I have argued that after the initial Flap, the region of motion affected by the Flap cannot increase in strength and / or size without additional energy input into the region in which the Flap was initiated and growing. The Flap cannot be responsible for a hurricane anywhere on the planet.

The very last time that I attempted to address a technical issue at Real Climate the subject was the lack of viscous dissipation in the Lorenz model equations.

The viscous dissipation term is almost always universally “the last term on the right-hand side” of the energy equation. And is almost always universally stated to be small and thus ‘dropped’ from all following analyses. Note that we are looking for about 4 W m-2 so about 2 W m-2 is by no means small.

For the case of single-phase flows the Kolmogorov scales associated with viscous dissipation offer a unique property of the flow, not the fluid, for the basis of accurate descriptions of empirical data for friction factor and heat transfer coefficients, for examples. Because the scales are a function of the flow and not the fluid, the descriptions are also a function of the flow. Relating the Kolmogorov scales to known mean-field states and boundary conditions is a powerful method for accurately correlating empirical data.

Recently, these somewhat related issues have been addressed in some papers in the literature. I have found the following to be very interesting.

A search at arXiv.org for Lucarini gives several interesting-looking hits. His personal Web site also list his publications.

The Abstract of 1. above reads:

” Starting from the classical Saltzman 2D convection equations, we derive via a severe spectral truncation a minimal 10 ODE system which includes the thermal effect of viscous dissipation. Neglecting this process leads to a dynamical system which includes a decoupled (generalized) Lorenz system. The consideration of this process breaks an important symmetry, couples the dynamics of fast and slow variables, ensuing modifications of the structural properties of the attractor and of the spectral features. When the relevant non dimensional number (Eckert number Ec) is different from zero, the system is ergodic and hyperbolic, the slow variables feature long term memory with 1/f^(3/2) power spectra, and the fast variables feature amplitude modulation on time scale of 1/Ec. Increasing the strength of the thermal-viscous feedback has a stabilizing effect, as both the metric entropy and the Kaplan-Yorke attractor dimension decrease monotonically with Ec. The analyzed system features very rich dynamics: it overcomes some of the limitations of the Lorenz system and might have prototypical value in relevant processes in complex systems dynamics, such as the interaction between slow and fast variables. the presence of long term memory and the associated extreme value statistics. Analysis shows how, neglecting the coupling of slow and fast variables only on the basis of scale analysis can be catastrophic. In fact, this leads to spurious invariances that affect essential dynamical properties (ergodicity, hyperbolicity) and that cause the model losing ability in describing intrinsically multi scale processes. ”

And in the text: ” When very large values of Ec are considered ( Ec > 0.045), the system loses its chaotic nature as no positive Lyapunov exponents are detected (not shown), whereas periodic motion is realized. ”

Dan H. Do you know of a numerical model of sea thermals driven by moist air that will run on a quad core PC? I just want to play with the adjustable parameters and see how it works. I don’t have time to re-invent the cylinder.

Are you the Dan H that always gets sent to the Bore Hole at Real Climate?

The dissipation argument seems very weak. You say that 2 W/m^2 is being dissipated via friction and viscous motion. Well, this number has always been approximately this value, and really can change only as a perturbation given variations in the thermal bath that the atmosphere sits in.

Therefore, what you want to look at is the delta around 2 W/m^2 and what exactly would this be? A fraction of this value?

Oh no, Obama wants to focus on the home front, now. He’s already screwed up foreign policy and has a grand start on screwing up the domestic bit. We need him to focus on … say … Mars. I’m sure Mars could stand some Obama spiffin’ up!

“Oasis Petroleum (OAS) has been a Bakken outperformer in 2013. It continues to reel in costs and beat on the bottom line. Like Triangle Petroleum (TPLM), it has a pressure pumping and midstream business. This has kept costs low. Oasis also continues to improve initial production rates. Like Kodiak (KOG), it is a Bakken pure play, and its leasehold is in a unique area that has a much larger value than the Street gives it credit. Its most recent acquisition solidifies Oasis’ position west of Nesson. This is important, as the majority of this could be best in play with respect to downspacing. Like Kodiak’s Liberty acquisition, this purchase could make or break Oasis’ year.”

There are many independent production layers in the Bakken:

The above picture shows how much thicker the Three Forks is when compared to the middle Bakken. It is important to note that the first and second bench of the Three Forks are consistent and should produce similarly. The third bench is not, as it will vary from one area to the next. The fourth bench is present at the Nesson Anticline and in two other areas to the west. Also, the dark green areas “sands” refer to two geological targets within the middle Bakken. In the center and to the right are the Sanish Sands. To the left, is the Pronghorn. Whiting has been developing both. One in its Sanish Field acreage located in Mountrail County and the Pronghorn in Billings and Stark. The above cross-section provides data, that may mean the fourth bench is present in northwest McKenzie County.

We have seen a huge improvement in well results in the same general area as Oasis’ new McKenzie and Williams county prospects. It is important to note, southwest Williams County (Painted Woods) is not as deep. Well pressures are lower in this area, which has produced lower IP rates. Recently we have seen much improved results using slickwater fracs. Liberty used these almost exclusively in western Williams and northwest McKenzie, and has produced better than other operators in the area. The table below provides Liberty’s well design.

Look at Fig. 5-7. Subtract longwave radiation to insolation, Ssw – Slw
The difference is positive (warming). The surface is heated by LWIR. Just as I said.

Qsw is not part of LWIR, QLW is the net of absorption and emission of LWIR by oceans. That net value is negative, thus the oceans are cooled by LWIR at all latitudes. The net of all radiation including solar SW is positive at all latitudes.

Anonymous coward Dr. Strangelove receives a spanking from non-anonymous Pekka Pirila. Fortunately for Stranglove his gross ignorance here won’t rub off into real life. Even Strangelove is not stupid enough to allow that. :-)

To a point and that is the point. The lower the water temperature the more efficiently it can be heated by the iron. As the water temperature rises the constant temperature iron is less efficient heating the water. You don’t have just radiant flux to consider, you have Fs,r + Fs,c + Fs,e = Fi or the sum of the surface energy fluxes, in radiant, convection and evaporation = input iron radiant flux at equilibrium. :)

By the way cappy do you happen to know what Kimoto’s opinion is on the health effects of second-hand tobacco smoke? I’m only asking because in certain circles (cough pekka paul cough cough pukite pirila cough) he can’t be right about anything else unless he agrees with the consensus about second hand smoke. ROFL

Webster, “Infrared radiation can heat water and given the effective thermal diffusivity of water in the open ocean (due to vertical eddies and turbulent mixing), the heat will disperse downwards.”
and upwards and sideways SFB until it reaches a new quasi steady state. The diffusion downward without an increase in mixing efficiency is offset by diffusion outward. You have layers of atmosphere and each will reach a quasi-steady state as well as the layers in the oceans IF mixing efficiency remains constant. Any addition of energy will increase the outward more than the inward diffusion because of gravity, heat rises.

BTW, Charney was in 1979. It was 2013 last I checked. This no climate scientist left behind/hire the scientifically handicapped is becoming expensive.

Springer, “By the way cappy do you happen to know what Kimoto’s opinion is on the health effects of second-hand tobacco smoke? I’m only asking because in certain circles (cough pekka paul cough cough pukite pirila cough) he can’t be right about anything else unless he agrees with the consensus about second hand smoke. ROFL”

Worse! It was published in E and E. It also has an error because it used K&T 1997 which had errors.

Webster, your problem is you don’t understand common sense. If Fs,r is 390, Fs,c is 24, Fc,e is 88 and Fa,r(DWLR) is 340, the 502/340 is the ratio of “equilibrium” outward to inward energy transfer. There is more out at the surface than in because the atmosphere also absorbs energy from the sun which is party of the 340 DWLR. Everyone knows that there is some downward diffusion, we want to know the limits.

Since the SST is ALWAYS warmer than the average of the deep ocean, changing the mixing efficiency will always change the effect rate of diffusion. You pick some ridiculous point you think is “normal” with no limit to diffusion you to just like Hansen, can predict the oceans will boil.

Prove it. A deep body of water. From overhead. Free to evaporate. All I’ve ever asked for is experimental demonstration of the claim that DWLIR from GHGs causes significant ocean warming except indirectly by causing warmer runoff from the continents. If you can, do it. If you can’t join all the others that have failed to do so. It’s not like I’m asking you to prove that humans descended from fish or something difficult like that. I mean how phucking hard can it be to find some radiant heater that warms a cup of coffee without touching the cup or the coffee or some schit like that fercrisakes.

On Tuesday, the chief human resources officers of more than 100 large corporations sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urging quick passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
…
A new immigration law, the corporate officers say, “would be a long overdue step toward aligning our nation’s immigration policies with its workforce needs at all skill levels to ensure U.S. global competitiveness.” The officials cite a publication of their trade group, the HR Policy Association, which calls for immigration reform to “address the reality that there is a global war for talent.” The way for the United States to win that war for talent, they say, is more immigration.
…
For example, Hewlett-Packard, whose Executive Vice President for Human Resources Tracy Keogh signed the letter, laid off 29,000 employees in 2012. In August of this year, Cisco Systems, whose Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Kathleen Weslock signed the letter, announced plans to lay off 4,000 — in addition to 8,000 cut in the last two years. United Technologies, whose Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Organization Elizabeth B. Amato signed the letter, announced layoffs of 3,000 this year. American Express, whose Chief Human Resources Officer L. Kevin Cox signed the letter, cut 5,400 jobs this year. Procter & Gamble, whose Chief Human Resources Officer Mark F. Biegger signed the letter, announced plans to cut 5,700 jobs in 2012.

Those are just a few of the layoffs at companies whose officials signed the letter. A few more: T-Mobile announced 2,250 layoffs in 2012. Archer-Daniels-Midland laid off 1,200. Texas Instruments, nearly 2,000. Cigna, 1,300. Verizon sought to cut 1,700 jobs by buyouts and layoffs. Marriott announced “hundreds” of layoffs this year. International Paper has closed plants and laid off dozens. And General Mills, in what the Minneapolis Star-Tribune called a “rare mass layoff,” laid off 850 people last year.

There are more still. In all, it’s fair to say a large number of the corporate signers of the letter demanding more labor from abroad have actually laid off workers at home in recent years.

That’s so unfair of you. Those 100 crony capitalists are people too. Their 6 and 7 figure salaries, stock options, retirement funds and cadillac medical insurance policies only stretch so far. We have to import millions of poor Mexicans to pick the fruits that no American will pick for slave wages, that these poor executives like to serve at brunch. We have to have El Salvadorans to cut their lawns, prune their shrubs and wash their clothes that Americans won’t cut, prune and wash for minimum wage, or less.

You are just a heartless conservative, trying to deprive millions of illegal immigrants of the opportunity to work for substandard wages in substandard conditions to support the life styles of our poor over worked corporate executives.

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

“Another point is that the maximum temperature may be very close to the surface like 1 mm deep in the water. That may be true under calm sunny conditions. As long as such conditions persist there’s stratification at depths below this temperature maximum. During those periods the skin is warmer than otherwise and evaporation is also stronger because of this increase in temperature. The heat that maintains the higher rate of evaporation and the higher skin temperature comes from that part of solar radiation that’s absorbed within a few mm from the surface. A stronger downwelling LWIR from the atmosphere helps by reducing heat loss as net LWIR.”

Again, that’s a lovely hypothesis. Without experimental verification it remains an hypothesis. The problem is you want to skip most of the scientific method and go straight from hypothesis to theory. This is the problem with climate science in general. Computer models are hypotheticals. Climate change advocates seem to believe the models are theories. They are not just as your hypothesis is not a theory.

Dr. Curry,
I can not get to this beyond abstract, but hope you might post something on it.
(AAAS Science News item on DOE proposal for new climate model)
Researchers Wary as DOE Bids to Build Sixth U.S. Climate Model
Eli Kintisch

The United States currently funds five major climate modeling efforts. But scientists and policymakers are eager to have even better models, and the U.S. Department of Energy is considering a plan to build a new, higher resolution model that could take into account features, such as ocean eddies or storms, that cover less than 100 square kilometers. Many researchers are excited about the nascent project, but others worry it could divert resources from existing collaborations.

cappy: “The diffusion downward without an increase in mixing efficiency is offset by diffusion outward. “

webby: That’s what diffusion is. It is a random walk. It is Brownian motion. The motion is in all directions and it propagates away from where the stimulus was introduced.

You’re babbling. If you can get heat to diffuse from colder to warmer without expending any work to do it then you’ve got yourself the first perpetuum mobile of the second kind ever. Maxwell’s Demon that is. Free energy.

“This month, the Environmental Protection Agency will propose standards that will establish stricter pollution limits for gas-fired power plants than coal-fired power plants, according to individuals who were briefed on the matter but asked not to be identified because the rule was not public yet.

The revised rule, which would impose greenhouse gas limits on power plants for the first time, will still require utilities to install costly carbon controls on coal plants.

EPA will unveil a proposal this month to limit carbon emissions from new coal and gas plants, sources say.

The agency initially proposed that any new power plant emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity produced but decided to overhaul that rule this spring out of concern that it would face a stiff legal challenge.

The average U.S. natural gas plant emits 800 to 850 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt, and coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds. According to those familiar with the new EPA proposal, the agency will keep the carbon limit for large natural gas plants at 1,000 pounds but relax it slightly for smaller gas plants. The standard for coal plants will be as high as 1,300 or 1,400 pounds per megawatt hour, the individuals said Wednesday, but that still means the utilities will have to capture some of the carbon dioxide they emit.

During his climate speech in June, President Obama described establishing a carbon rule for new plants as part of his overall plan to address global warming.”